A zombie-fire outbreak may be growing in the north:
Each winter, as snow blankets Alaska and northern Canada, the wildfires of the summer extinguish, and calm prevails—at least on the surface. Beneath all that white serenity, some of those fires actually continue smoldering underground, chewing through carbon-rich peat, biding their time. When spring arrives and the chilly landscape defrosts, these "overwintering" fires pop up from below—that's why scientists call them zombie fires.
Now, a new analysis in the journal Nature quantifies their extent for the first time, and shows what conditions are most likely to make the fires reanimate. Using satellite data and reports from the ground, researchers developed an algorithm that could detect where over a decade's worth of fires—dozens in total—burned in Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories, snowed over, and ignited again in the spring. Basically, they correlated burn scars with nearby areas where a new fire ignited later on.
[...] Northern soils are loaded with peat, dead vegetation that's essentially concentrated carbon. When a wildfire burns across an Arctic landscape, it also burns vertically through this soil. Long after the surface fire has exhausted the plant fuel, the peat fire continues to smolder under the dirt, moving deeper down and also marching laterally. In their analysis, Scholten and her colleagues found this is most likely to happen following hotter summers, because that makes vegetation drier, thus igniting more catastrophically. "The more severe it burns, the deeper it can burn into that soil," says VU Amsterdam Earth systems scientist Sander Veraverbeke, co-author on the new paper. "And the deeper it burns, the higher the chances that that fire will hibernate." Even when autumn rain falls or the surface freezes in the winter, water isn't able to penetrate the soil enough to entirely extinguish it.
Then spring arrives and the ice retreats. These hot spots can flare up, seeking more vegetation to burn at the edges of the original burn scar. "Basically, right after the snow melts, we already have dry fuel available," says Scholten.
Journal Reference:
Rebecca C. Scholten, Randi Jandt, Eric A. Miller, et al. Overwintering fires in boreal forests, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03437-y)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24 2021, @11:12PM (5 children)
...it's just Nature!
For those of you who live with the guilt of being Human, I'd like to remind you:
The idyllic world which existed before we poopy Humans came along... DIDN'T EXIST.
Nature has always been horrible and scary.
Pre-historic wildfires like you would not believe. Long may she reign!
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24 2021, @11:51PM (4 children)
Only the delusional tree-huggers, vegans and other fruitcakes claim that Mother Nature is all beauty, harmony, peace, and that the animals are our "friends".
Nature is not in "harmony", it is in equilibrium.
Or at least it used to be, before the human cancer came along.
To cite the movie "The Age of Stupid": We will not have been the first species on Earth to self destruct, but we will have been the first one to do so knowingly.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:18AM (1 child)
If the human cancer doesn't stop trying to kill its host soon, it will disappear and nature will get back to whatever it wants to be. Global warming is only a problem for us: I don't think the planet and the life it harbors really cares if it's 10 degrees hotter or colder: life will just go on without us in a different form.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:26AM
Surface life, anyway. Underground life probably won't change much unless we turn the entire planet into Arrakis before dying off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @12:54PM (1 child)
Well, it looks like we have a butthurt vegan snowflake with modpoints on this board who decided that my post was "flamebait".
Jerk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27 2021, @07:36PM
Get rid of the first sentence and you might have cause to be offended. The first sentence was simply flamebait or a troll, take your pick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24 2021, @11:14PM
Get Centralia Fire, PA been buring since 1967. They have moved the town and roads. Now, that was millions of years contrasted carbon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday May 25 2021, @12:02AM (3 children)
I can't figure out where the oxygen is coming from to keep the fires going underground.
Mine fires I understand because mines have openings.
Do these places not have airtight ice on top?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:29AM (1 child)
You need heat, fuel and oxygen. Heat from the anaerobic peat decomposition biochemical process, fuel which is apparently dry and already there, and ... wait for the ice/snow to melt, and there's your fire. Until then it's "smoldering", which is heat and fuel, but not enough oxygen to be a flame, I think.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday May 25 2021, @03:28AM
That would make sense. Thank you.
(Score: 3, Funny) by EJ on Tuesday May 25 2021, @01:45AM
How do volcanoes work?
What is fire?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got nothing.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @12:14AM (1 child)
Bad enough when there were only slow zombies. Then we got fast zombies. And now you are telling me we have fire zombies? The only commonality seems to be a taste for human brains.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:04AM
If (working) brains are a required food for Zombies, most of the world won't have any risk of a real zombie apocalypse....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @12:26AM
Full of methane from all that ground up organic matter, both from plants and animals.
Once the ice cover melts down, good times, baby.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Thursday May 27 2021, @08:00PM
I wonder if anyone ever got charged for starting a fire that was actually a zombie fire? Say someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and accused based on circumstantial evidence?