Human-caused global warming is going to kill this planet. A Washington Post article about zombie fires in Alaska and Siberia.

The Washington Post

Capital Weather Gang

‘Zombie fires’ are erupting in Alaska and likely Siberia, signaling severe Arctic fire season may lie ahead

Move over, ‘murder hornets.’ There’s a new 2020 phenomenon to worry about.

By Andrew Freedman

May 28, 2020

The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.

These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.

With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.

[Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average]

Last year brought a record surge in fires to a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The Arctic contains vast stores of carbon and other planet-warming greenhouse gases in its soils, in peat as well as frozen soil known as permafrost, that can be freed up through combustion. Peatlands are wetlands that contain ancient, decomposed and partially decomposed organic matter.

According to Mark Parrington, senior scientist and wildfire expert at the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), recent Arctic fire detections have been found in areas where blazes were burning last summer, which lines up with regions affected by warmer-than-average and unusually dry surface conditions.

“We know from the climate data provided by C3S that the Arctic Circle regions most affected by fires in 2019 were experiencing warmer and drier surface conditions, providing the ideal environment for fires to burn and persist,” Parrington said in a news release, referring to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Scientists such as Parrington use satellite sensors to detect hot spots that could indicate wildfire activity.

“We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘Zombie’ fires might have reignited, yet it has not been confirmed by ground measurements,” Parrington said. “The anomalies are quite widespread in areas that were burning last summer.”

“If this is the case, then under certain environmental conditions, 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,” he continued.
A real-world version of the fire swamp

January-to-April temperature departures from average, showing the most significant temperature anomalies across Russia, including Siberia. (Berkeley Earth)

Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher at the University of Alberta, says zombie fires are not unheard of, citing the destructive Fort McMurray fire in Alberta that burned for more than a year during 2016 and 2017.

“Fires are popping up early this year, and some of them are fires that burned through the winter,” Flannigan said in an interview.

In April, fire technicians riding snowmobiles found a zombie fire smoldering near Willow, Alaska, and officials have been on the lookout for other similar zombie blazes.

North-central Siberia experienced record heat last week, which came on the heels of a record-warm winter. Several stations in north-central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, saw temperatures climb well into the 80s.

On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees, about 46 degrees above normal. The typical maximum temperature for that day at that location is 32 degrees. The town obliterated its previous record high for the date, 54 degrees, and its monthly record, 68 degrees.

The Siberian warmth in May has not been a fluke event, either; instead, it has been a consistent feature since the winter. Temperature departures from average in Europe and Asia have helped push global average surface temperatures to record highs this year; on global temperature maps, these regions stand out as splotches of crimson red.

[Wildfires ravaged Siberia last year. This spring, the blazes are starting even bigger.]

The temperature departures from average in Siberia this year are some of the highest of any area on Earth. Since January, the region has been running at least 5.4 degrees (3 Celsius) above the long-term average, according to a recent report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth, which monitors global temperature trends, Russia averaged a temperature anomaly of nearly 11 degrees (6 Celsius) above average for the January-to-April period.

“That’s not only a new record anomaly for Russia,” Rohde wrote on Twitter. “That’s the largest January to April anomaly ever seen in any country’s national average.”

Such warmth has dramatic repercussions for the landscape, primarily through evapotranspiration, the process by which plants and soils release moisture into the atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so too does the moisture exchanged between the soils and the air. “When temperatures warm up, [the air is] much more efficient at sucking the moisture out of the fuel,” Flannigan said.

The heat is causing snow cover to melt and is accelerating the drying of soils, including peatlands, that would be more resistant to burning under wetter conditions.

Historically, Arctic peatlands served as a fire break, says Mike Waddington, an ecohydrologist at McMaster University in Canada. “Now it’s more of a fire propagator” because of increasing temperatures that make it easier for soils to dry out quickly, he said. Not only are these carbon-rich landscapes more prone to burning, but Arctic wildfires are also burning deeper into the soils, freeing more carbon into the atmosphere in a feedback loop that enhances warming.

[The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback]

The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.

Waddington’s research has shown that northern peatlands are likely to dry faster than forests, and he said burning more peatlands will lead to more carbon emissions. There is more carbon stored in northern peatlands (including boreal forests, sub-Arctic areas and the Arctic itself), than is contained in tropical rainforests, Waddington said.

“These issues are things that scientists have been warning about: The extremes are getting worse. They’ll be more drying, more fire, bigger fire, more carbon dioxide” released into the air,” he said. “It’s something we are expecting, and if we are seeing it now, 10, 15, 20 years from now it’s only going to be worse.”

Flannigan says the relationship between temperature and wildfires is rather simple: “The warmer it gets, the more fire we see.”