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dw861 writes:

The Washington Post shares a newly published article from the academic journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The article suggests that the pattern of global wildfires varies based on the day of the week — with considerably fewer fires globally on Sunday than on other days. It partly attributes this pattern not to anything natural about ecosystems, but rather to human behavioral patterns — including weekly rituals that are ultimately rooted in culture and faith.

The researchers used NASA satellite imagery to look at all global fires from 2001 to 2013, with images taken four times each day. The images were then scanned by an algorithm to detect large fires, which can occur both for natural reasons — i.e., lightning — but also due to human causes.

This appears to have been the first time that researchers tried to detect a weekly cycle in the occurrence of global fires — which, if fires were a purely natural phenomenon, shouldn't exist. "There's nothing in nature that's on a weekly cycle," the authors say.

The paper makes the attribution to religion directly:

The research also hinted that, while fires on a global scale go down on Sunday, there might be regional variations, also tied to faith — including different practices in non-Christian countries. For instance, the authors point to predominantly Muslim Kazakhstan, where the fire minimum was actually on Thursday and Friday.

Original Submission