‘Zombie fires’ in the Arctic are reigniting and could be a sign of bigger blazes to come this summer, scientists say.
The flames, which have been burning underground since last year’s record blazes in the region, were first spotted reigniting on the surface by satellites belonging to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitorting Service (CAM).
“We may see a cumulative effect of last year’s fire season in the Arctic which will feed into the upcoming season, and could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” Mike Parrington, a CAM expert, said, according to Science Alert .
The summer of 2019 saw over 100 wildfires burning from Siberia to Alaska, on an unprecedented magnitude and duration. In Canada, more than 3,000 wildfires were reported, burning up to 1.8 million hectares of land.
Parrington said that the hot spots are seemingly concentrated in the same areas that burned last summer — Russia, Greenland, Canada, and the U.S. state of Alaska.
The Arctic regions have also seen an unusually warm and dry spring this year, which could fuel the risk of wildfires. “There has been tremendous warmth in the Arctic that will have led to a lot of drying, making the peat soils ripe to burn,” Mike Waddington, an expert on watershed ecosystems at McMaster University told AFP.
Scientists in Alaska have also observed over 35 ‘holdover fires’ — embers buried deep in the soil in peat lands that spark weeks, months or years later — in the region since 2005. Seven of them were visible from space.
“Fire managers noted increasing occurrences where fires survive the cold and wet boreal winter months by smouldering, and re-emerged in the subsequent spring,” the Alaska Fire Science Consorti stated in their spring 2020 newsletter.
Scientists fear that the blazes could cause permafrost in the Arctic to melt, which would in turn release swaths of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, destabilize glaciers and increase the sea level.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
