"Wildfires in Siberia are bigger than all the other fires in the world combined"
This appalling claim is the title of an article published in the Washington Post on July 27, 2021, and in fact the problem may be even more serious, because from the data level, it is far more than the size of 2020!
The unprecedented Siberian fire season of 2020 emitted up to 4.5 tons of carbon dioxide, but this year's wildfire season has released more than 505 million tons of carbon dioxide, and of course, the wildfire season this year is far from over!
As early as July 13, the Siberian Times reported on the severity of the Siberian fires under the headline "Permafrost burns hundreds of wildfires in the coldest regions of the world":
Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia – here is the coldest inhabited region in the world in the Republic of Sakha of the Russian Federation (temperatures reached -88 °C in January 2018), more than 300 fires covering 12,140 square kilometers of forest, half of which have been controlled and some of which have been controlled, because they have burned out, but more fires are out of control!
More than a month has passed, what is the situation now?
The Washington Post report is not controlled, but is expanding dramatically, with drought in the Yakutia region and the arrival of a strong windstor, the area of fires has expanded dramatically, according to Yaroshenko, the scale of fires that are taking place in Siberia has exceeded the combined size of fires in Greece, Turkey, Italy, the United States and Canada.
Map of recorded wildfires from March to July 2021
According to the News Agency of the Russian Federal Forestry Service on August 10, more than 100 fires covered nearly 10,000 square kilometers of land in the Sakha Republic. Amber Soja, an associate researcher at the National Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a NASA Langley Research Center, said that "2021 is already the biggest fire year in the Sakha Republic, and even 10 days have passed in August."
According to Greenpeace, since the beginning of this year, the area of forest fires in Siberia has exceeded 160,000 square kilometers, about twice the size of Austria, and more than 8,600 firefighters, as well as soldiers and economic rescue workers, have participated in the fire fighting.
A firefighter extinguishes a fire in the village of Byas-Kuel in the Russian Far East on Aug. 7
Due to serious understaffing and staffing, 69 of these fires in remote areas are burning recklessly because they do not threaten residential areas for the time being, and these fires affect more than 20,000 square kilometers. Satellite imagery from Copernicus, the European atmospheric monitoring agency, shows that the smoke from the Siberian fires covered more than 5.17 million square kilometers and had drifted to the Arctic.
Evgeny Ponomarev, an associate professor at Siberian Federal University and a senior researcher at the Sukachev Forestry Institute, said that the area of fires in the polar regions (within the Arctic Circle) in 2021 is 10 times that of 2020, which is a rather shocking statistic that these fires in the permafrost may permanently change the face of the Arctic.
Why are there such big fires in Siberia?
High temperatures and drought are the two major triggers for the fires in Siberia, and the "hot dome" in the Moscow region at the end of May this year brought Moscow in May to a high temperature of 31 ° C that had not been seen in more than 100 years, and moscow should be only a dozen degrees in normal years, and it is also the season to wear coats.
In June, the high temperature season in the Yakutia region of the Sakha Republic of the Far East begins, and according to Sergei Sivtsev, head of forestry in the Yakutia region, mid-June is the hottest season since 1888. Another person in charge, Eisen Nikolaev, said that "we are experiencing the hottest and driest summer in the history of meteorological surveying since the end of the 19th century"!
Thunderstorms: one of the causes of fires in Siberia
Lightning formed by the discharge of clouds on the ground is an important cause of fires in no man's land, and extremely hot weather makes it impossible for dry forests to see half of Mars, and once the lightning strike ignites, it will form a fire, and drought and high winds will connect these fires into pieces, and eventually become a devil who spits out a huge amount of dioxide towers into the atmosphere.
Flames under the ice that cannot be extinguished: another important cause of fires in Siberia
It's unbelievable to say that there are some inexplicable fires in Siberia and Alaska and northern Canada, which often occur in uninhabited areas, and which can also occur in the spring, when there is no lightning and the forests are not dry enough, how can they burn up?
These fires come from underground, possibly from fires last year or the year before or even many years ago, burning into the peat layer, which is a layer of combustible substance formed by humus accumulation that can be used as fuel, and when the fire ignites these peat layers, it will form an underground flame that burns like a coal mine, and many peat fires occur in the permafrost zone, and it can even burn under the permafrost layer.
You don't know when it will emerge, if the outcrop area is forest then it will reappear on the ground and cause a bigger fire, and may also trigger the next peat layer fire, so every winter, Siberia and the Arctic Circle are frozen for thousands of miles, and when there is a dead silence, the peat layer still retains the fire, what a terrible fire, once it occurs, can not be extinguished.
On August 10, 2021, pnas published a paper titled "Methane release from carbonate rock formations in the siberian permafrost area during and after the 2020 heat wave" (2020 Methane release from carbonate formations in the Permafrost region of Siberia during and after annual heat waves).
Dr. Nikolaus froitzheim, a professor at the University of Bonn, has studied the problem of methane released in the region after the 2020 Siberian fire season, which he calls a "methane bomb" that may have been released in the Siberian region, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times higher than the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Another group of scientists found that permafrost thawing could be 40 billion tons higher than previously estimated carbon dioxide emissions.
Ring Arctic Wave Formation: The climate in the Arctic has changed permanently
On May 17, 2021, iopscience published a paper titled "Relationship between circum-arctic atmospheric wave patterns and large-scale wildfires in boreal summer," proposing a "ring arctic wave" New circulation concept.
A joint scientific team from Japan, South Korea and the United States has identified a new atmospheric circulation pattern around the Arctic, dubbed the "Ring Arctic Wave, which could lead to larger wildfires around the polar regions, especially in Siberia and the subpolar regions of North America.
In the paper, lead author Teppei J. Yasunari, an assistant professor at Hokkaido University, revealed the relationship between wildfires, air pollution, or aerosols and climate patterns: wildfires emit large amounts of PM2.5 and smaller particles into the atmosphere, which are the main factors in winter and spring smog, and after snowfall, a "dark snow effect" is formed to absorb more heat and accelerate snowmelt, Yasunari also said:
"The increase in PM2.5 levels is highly correlated with relatively high organic carbon aerosol concentrations, which means wildfires are more active. We concluded that summer wildfires caused abnormally high PM2.5 in the Arctic, and that wildfires were likely to occur in extremely warm and dry conditions during those months. This is due to ongoing or developing high-voltage systems in Europe, Siberia, and the Subpolar regions of North America (Alaska and Canada). ”
A very unfortunate conclusion, the future of Siberia high temperatures and wildfires, as well as Alaska and northern Canada wildfires may be more frequent, and the last thing we want to see is that every year in the future human beings will witness the history of extreme climate, and ipcc's report shows that what is happening now is only the climate change at 1.1 °C, I believe you are already a little crazy feeling, so what about the future 1.5 °C and 2 °C or even 4 °C?
Read more: Fires in the United States, Canada, and Europe
According to the U.S. interagency fire center, more than 100 fires have occurred in the United States this year, burning an area of 23,000 square kilometers. More than 33,600 square kilometers of Canada burned.
According to data from the European Forest Fire Information System, Turkey burned an area of 1760 square kilometers this year, in Greece, the fire destroyed 1098 square kilometers, and Italy burned 1043 square kilometers.
Q&A: At this rate, how many years can the earth's forests burn?
reference:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abf7ef
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2107632118
https://watchers.news/2021/06/04/circum-arctic-wave-caw-new-atmospheric-circulation/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/10/siberia-sakha-fires-record-carbon/
https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/features/permafrost-is-ablaze-with-hundreds-of-wildfires-in-worlds-coldest-region/
https://www.livescience.com/siberian-wildfire-smoke-reaches-north-pole.html?utm_source=notification