On April 22, 2021, the Russian emergency services reported that there had been an extremely abnormal fire in the Omsk Oblast in southwest Siberia, a forest fire broke out in thousands of square kilometers near Omsk, and the smoke had spread to the east for more than 700 kilometers, seriously affecting Novosibirsk, Russia's third largest city, and citizens reported a sharp drop in visibility on the road!
How serious are the fires in Russia?
On April 27, 2021, the "Moscow Times" reported that the city of Novosibirsk has been shrouded in smoke from the fire, residents say they can smell thick smoke on the roads of the city, and the Novosibirsk city government has issued an "Black Sky" warning of serious air pollution, and local media said that the sun in the sky is as blood red as the sunset due to the smoke in the sky.
Novosibirsk is shrouded in smoke
Omsk is located in western Siberia, to the north, on the border with Kazakhstan.
Images obtained by NASA's Aqua satellite
On April 22, 2021, the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) of the Aqua satellite obtained color images of the fire burning near and north of Omsk, Russia.
Satellite image of the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2
Satellite images of ongoing fires in the Omsk region of southwestern Siberia, Russia, were obtained on April 24 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, where the number of fire points near Omsk is dense.
Judging from the Russian fire map, this year's Russian wildfires came a little early and are larger, and from the wildfire map, wildfires are happening everywhere in the Siberian region!
Fire map of the Russian Fire Department: a blood-red fire map
NASA FIRMS's fire map focuses primarily on the kazakh-Russian border area
Why this year's wildfire season comes so early
Earlier this year, Russian weather forecasters warned that siberian bushfires would increase in 2021 due to hot and dry weather, and Russia has set multiple heat records in recent years.
Omsk and Novosibirsk
NASA's weather report
April is the colder month of the Omsk region, with the average temperature generally around 8.9°C, but on April 15, 2021, the temperature in Omsk reached 22.2°C, exceeding the average temperature of 13°C, and April was accompanied by strong winds, triggering the wildfire season to start earlier!
Sowing habits of Russian farmers
Farmers in Russia's Siberian region have poor farming habits, burning the weeds and straw left in their fields before spring sowing every year, and in April, Around Novosibirsk and Omsk, not only did the temperature rise this year but also accompanied by strong winds, and uncontrollable fires directly affected the nearby forests, causing widespread but irrefutable fires.
Environmentalists are also blaming Russia for the fact that the increase in forest fires in recent years is inextricably linked to a lack of effective management of forests and the low level of government funding for forest fires.
The after-effects of global warming: the flames under the ice, which cannot be extinguished
An indisputable fact is happening, wildfires in siberia are increasing significantly every year, of course, including Alaska and northern Canada, behind the increase in wildfires is the increasing heat near the Arctic Circle since global warming, last year's high temperature record in the Arctic Circle was june 20, 2020 in the Siberian town of Shangyansk, the temperature reached 38 °C, while the local average temperature in June was 18 °C.
High temperatures, dryness and high winds may seem inevitable that fires will occur in these areas, but a report on EcoWatch on June 1, 2020 is a bit chilling, because some wildfires may not have been produced in the same year, maybe last year or even the year before!
On April 17, 2020, two firefighters in the Mat-Su area of the Alaska Forestry Department found smoke emitting near Rolly Creek, Willow Swamp's area, and their handheld thermal imager found that the ground temperature was 123°C-198°C, and it was obvious that there was a fire point underground!
But there is no fire point on the surface, and even most of the area is still covered with snow, which was once a fire in August 2019, after which the fire was extinguished and covered by snowfall after winter.
Zombie fires that can burn continuously underground
Jessica McCarty, an Arctic Fire Researcher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Miami, said that zombie fires can reach the ground as soon as the snow and ice melt, forming new fires!
This is the special morphology of the peat layer, peat is a coarse humus layer formed by peatification, it can also be said that the coal with the lowest degree of coalification, in the peat swamp area, often people use it as fuel, and the high temperature in the Arctic will dry the peat layer, lightning strikes or fires can ignite the peat layer, there are a large number of gaps in the gap in the peat layer, and the interior is full of methane and oxygen, so this kind of smouldering can reach months or even years!
So when the snow melts the next year, the peat layer will return to the ground, and if there is suitable combustible material around, it will cause another fire, and the fire found by two firefighters in the Mat-Su area near Rolly Creek in willow Swamp is the zombie fire of this peat layer.
Schematic diagram of the distribution of peat layers and wildfires
Most of the peat layers are in high latitudes, such as Siberia in Russia and Alaska in the United States, as well as the Yukon and Nuvut in Canada and the Nordic region, Greenland is also covered with a large number of peat layers, the global peat area reached 4.1 million square kilometers, accounting for about 3% of the global land area, there is no doubt that these are hidden dangers, and this fire can not be extinguished!
Coal seam fire
The peat layer fire is the same as the coal fire, which is a world problem, and the consequences are very serious, the European Union Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Agency determined that many of the fires in the Arctic Circle are caused by zombie fires in the peat layer!
With the arrival of the high temperature season, the snow in the Arctic Circle will gradually melt, this year's wildfire situation will be very severe, and it will release astronomical carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, which will promote global warming faster.