What’s the news?

• According to a recent study, Global warming is responsible for bigger and bigger fires in Siberia, and in the decades ahead they could release huge amounts of carbon now trapped in the soil.
• Researchers concentrated on an area five and a half times the size of France and with satellite pictures observed the surface area burned each year from 1982 to 2020.

Key Highlights

• In 2020, fire charred more than 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) of land and released, in CO2 equivalent, as much as that emitted by Spain in one year.
• The summer in Siberia was on average three times hotter than it was in 1980. The Russian city of Verkhoyansk hit 38 degrees Celsius in summer, a record for the Arctic.
• The average air temperature in summer, from June to August, surpassed 10 degrees Celsius only four times in the period under study: in 2001, 2018, 2019 and 2020. These turned out to be the years with the most fires too.

Source of Permafrost

• Arctic soils store huge amounts of organic carbon, much of it in peatlands. This is often frozen or marshy, but climate warming thaws and dries peatland soil, making large Arctic fires more likely.
• Fire damages frozen soil called permafrost, which releases even more carbon.
• Higher temperatures have a variety of effects: more water vapour in the atmosphere, which causes more storms and thus more fire-sparking lightning. And vegetation grows more, providing more fuel for fire, but it also breathes more, which dries things out.

Different Scenarios

• Looking ahead to the future, the study analysed two possible scenarios:

• In the first one, nothing is done to fight climate change and temperatures keep rising steadily. In this case fires of the same gravity as in 2020 may occur every year.

In the second scenario, concentrations of greenhouse gases stabilise and temperatures level out by the second half of this century. In this case severe fires like those of 2020 would break out on average every 10 years.

reference:

https://www.hindustantimes.com/environment/arctic-wildfires-releasing-more-co2-than-ever-study-101667543563546.html