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How to stop smoking fires that weren’t there before? Out of nowhere, satellites captured spontaneous eruptions of so-called zombie fires north of the Arctic Circle amid a record six-month heat wave.
Before we explain zombie fires, let’s look at the most common causes of wildfires. According to the US National Park Service, nearly 85 percent of wildfires in the United States are caused by humans. That’s more or less the case for the rest of the world. Most of the time it is either unattended campfires, the burning of debris, malfunctioning equipment, use of equipment, discarded cigarettes, or intentional arson that sparks fires.
When it comes to natural causes, there are only two common causes. Lightning is the most common and volcanic is less common. There are also meteors and coal seam fires, but those are extremely rare.
So-called zombie fires are fires that seem to be extinguished, but continue to burn underground. After a period of time, these fires reignite on the surface. Embers that are contained deep within organic soil such as peatlands, can spark flames reigniting fires weeks, months, and even years later, phys.org reports.
American and European monitoring agencies have been watching the Arctic for some time, particularly large swathes of Siberia and Alaska. 2019 saw zombie fires break out on an unprecedented scale.
It appears that 2020 may be an even worse year than 2019 for zombie fires. Now, satellite images were taken north of the Arctic Cir. in Russia on June 8, 2020, captured zombie fires burning again and some of the same areas where they broke out last summer. Scientists suspect that these fires kept burning underground during winter, and amid the persistent high temperatures in the area, where record heat wave heads into its sixth month, it has led to another breakout of zombie fires, ABC Australia reported.
Scientists are concerned because the new fires above the Arctic Circle are burning more intensely than they have in the long-term average of the past, and are increasing day by day over the past week.
“We might actually be missing some of the fire activity which is burning in peat that could even be burning underground, so it may not be detectable by satellites,” said Dr. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS).
Another weather phenomenon has been detected in Siberia and Alaska known as fire thunderstorms. These are also called “fire-induced storms” or technically as pyroCbs. In this little-known weather phenomenon, intense wildfires can spawn their own thunderstorms, creating lightning, which can spark additional blazes far away and send plumes of smoke and aerosols into the stratosphere, a report from Yale EDU says.
“Events that were once thought to be relatively rare have been observed to be happening a lot more frequently in places of the world where it wasn’t thought that these kinds of events could take place,” says Dr. Parrington.
