{"id":27195,"date":"2020-10-13T11:32:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T08:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/?p=27195"},"modified":"2020-10-13T11:49:25","modified_gmt":"2020-10-13T08:49:25","slug":"climate-heat-melts-arctic-snows-and-dries-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/chief-editors-choice\/climate-heat-melts-arctic-snows-and-dries-forests\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate heat melts Arctic snows and dries forests"},"content":{"rendered":"

The northern polar region isn\u2019t just warming: it\u2019s also smoking, as the rising heat thaws the Arctic snows. Researchers have identified a new class of fire hazard. High above the Arctic Circle, fires that flared a year ago continued to smoulder under the snow through the winter to flare up again \u2212 two months earlier than usual, and on a scale not seen before. And if the notion of fire and ice seems a surprise, prepare for the idea of a blazing rainforest.<\/p>\n

In a second and separate study, researchers exploring the climate lessons from the deep past 90 million years ago have found that, if the atmosphere is rich enough in oxygen, then even the wettest foliage can ignite and burn, to consume perhaps up to 40% of the world\u2019s forest.<\/p>\n

Scientists from the US report in Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unexpected threat from \u201czombie fires\u201d which, despite heavy snowmelt, they say \u201ccan smoulder in carbon-rich peat below the surface for months or years, often only detectable through smoke released at the surface, and can even occur through cold winter months.\u201d They warn that in the fast-changing climate of the highest northern latitudes, the evidence from last year and this suggest that extreme temperatures and drier conditions mean there is a lot more surface fuel in the Arctic to catch fire and melt the Arctic snows.<\/p>\n

Dwarf shrubs, sedges, mosses and grasses are invading the tundra, to join the surface peat, and even the bogs, fens and marches of the tundra are now burning. In all, 50% of the detected fires above 65\u00b0North \u2212 many in the Russian Arctic \u2212 happened on permafrost: that is, on ever-icy soils. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the amount of burned area that is alarming,\u201d said Merritt Turetsky of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and one of the authors. \u201cThere are other trends we noticed in the satellite data that tell us how the Arctic fire regime is changing and what this spells for our climate future.\u201d Wildfires are on the increase now, in a world in which climate change has delivered hotter and drier conditions for many regions. Unexpectedly, according to a second study in Nature Geoscience, fossilized evidence in rocks in Utah has delivered evidence of massive and sustained forest fires, in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons preserved in black shales laid down in the Cretaceous.<\/p>\n

Researchers pieced together a story of dramatic climate change 94 million years ago, when carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, and land and sea plants began to absorb it from the atmosphere on a massive scale. Microbial respiration stepped up too, and parts of the ocean became increasingly low in oxygen. During 100,000 years of this, so much carbon had been buried in the ground or the oceans that \u2013 with the release of molecular oxygen, the O2 in CO2 \u2212 atmospheric oxygen levels began to increase. And with that, the scientists say, so did the probability of forest fires, even in wet forest ecosystems. Altogether, perhaps 30% to 40% of the planet\u2019s forests were consumed by fire over 100 millennia.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the consequences of having more oxygen in the atmosphere is that it\u2019s easier to burn fires. It\u2019s the same reason you blow on embers to stoke a fire,\u201d said Garrett Boudinot, then at the University of Boulder Colorado and now with the Colorado Wildlife Council, who led the research. \u201cThis finding highlights the prolonged impacts of climate change. The climate change we are causing now, it\u2019s not something where if we don\u2019t fix it, only our grandkids will have to deal with it. The history of climate change in Earth history tells us that the impacts are really long-lasting.\u201d \u2212<\/p>\n

Source: Climate News Network<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The northern polar region isn\u2019t just warming: it\u2019s also smoking, as the rising heat thaws the Arctic snows. Researchers have identified a new class of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5081,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5594],"tags":[5927,8000,189,905],"class_list":["post-27195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chief-editors-choice","tag-arctic-fires","tag-arctic-snows","tag-climate-change","tag-research","wpcat-5594-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Antarctic_sea.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27198,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27195\/revisions\/27198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vastuullisuusuutiset.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}