The team found a way around these hurdles by studying carbon monoxide expelled into the atmosphere during blazes. “Earth’s atmosphere already contains large amounts of carbon dioxide from human fossil fuel burning, and the existing greenhouse gas is difficult to distinguish from that produced by forest fires,” said Chen. Models used to simulate fuel load, fuel consumption and fire efficiency work well under ordinary circumstances but are not robust enough to represent extreme wildfires, according to the researchers.Īnd there is another roadblock of our own creation. Rugged, smoke-enshrouded terrain hampers satellite observations during a combustion event, and space-based measurements are not at a sufficiently fine resolution to reveal details of CO 2 emissions. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earth’s climate will be even more challenging than we thought.”Īnalyzing the amount of carbon dioxide released during wildfires is difficult for Earth system scientists for a variety of reasons. “These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.”ĭavis added, “Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO 2 as global aviation in 2021. “The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs,” said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions. “These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.” “According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records,” said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO 2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO 2 emissions between 20, the scientists reported in a paper in Science. Irvine, Calif., MaCarbon dioxide emissions from wildfires, which have been gradually increasing since 2000, spiked drastically to a record high in 2021, according to an international team of researchers led by Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine.
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