Arctic wildfires ‘rapidly’ burning permafrost, causing more intense wildfires

A destructive cycle is worsening throughout the world’s arctic regions.

Numerous areas throughout Earth have “permafrost,” or layers of soil and sediment beneath the surface that remain frozen no matter the season. Humans, in their hubris, believed the frost to be “permanent,” but human-driven climate change, through the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, is shaking that stability.

Wildfires have recently burned more and more acres throughout the world’s arctic regions, causing unprecedented permafrost thawing and soil drying, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications. The abrupt drying is causing a subsequent abrupt increase in wildfires, continuing the vicious cycle.

“The abrupt soil drying and intensified atmospheric aridity can facilitate an abrupt increase in fires, related to biomass and peat burning over the permafrost regions,” the researchers said. “The abrupt increase in sensible heat fluxes can intensify the warming of near-surface air temperature and enhance atmospheric aridity, further promoting wildfire intensity.”

Fire in Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska
Fire in Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska. NPS photo.

Researchers estimate burned acreage throughout arctic areas will more than double after permafrost thaw, while historically fire-prone areas do not see changes. Additionally, once soil moisture is lost, it isn’t regained until after a long recovery period which researchers estimate to be over two years, further prolonging wildfire activity.

The researchers said their hypothesis was confirmed in the study: Soil moisture loss triggers a cascading effect in arctic areas, leading to rapid biomass burning, atmospheric drying, and an abrupt increase in wildfires and emissions.

“The abrupt increase in wildfires over the historical permafrost regions can contribute to changes in net terrestrial carbon uptake,” the researchers said. “Furthermore, the contribution of carbon release from wildfires to the net terrestrial carbon balance in these regions accelerates after the mid-21st century.”

It’s not the first study to link permafrost burning to increased emissions. A NASA study last year looked specifically at how wildfires throughout Alaska’s largest river delta were affecting that area’s permafrost and found clusters of methane “hot spots” where wildfires burned into tundra.

“We find that [methane] hotspots are roughly 29 percent more likely on average in tundra that burned within the last 50 years compared with  unburned areas, and that this effect is nearly tripled along burn scar perimeters that are delineated by surface water features,” the researchers said. “Our results indicate that the changes following tundra fire favor the complex environmental conditions needed to generate emission hotspots.”

READ MORE: Burning Alaskan permafrost increasing methane emissions

Oregon forestry out of money after ‘most expensive wildfire season’ in history

Wildfires have so far burned nearly 2 million acres of land throughout Oregon this year, the highest annual burned acreage the state’s department of forestry has ever seen and nearly double the 1.1 million acres burned during the notorious 2020 wildfire season.

The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) reportedly spent over $250 million fighting the fires, drying up the entirety of the department’s budget, according to local broadcast station KGW.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Oregon’s worst wildfire season ever: How many acres have burned so far in 2024?

“The scale … people have to see it to understand just how many acres burned across the state this summer,” ODF Deputy Director for Fire Operations Kyle Williams told KGW. “Just because the smoke wasn’t present in our more populated areas doesn’t mean that (wildfires) weren’t deeply impactful.”

Smoke over La Pine in central Oregon. Photo by Deschutes County Sheriff's office.
Smoke over La Pine in central Oregon. Photo by Deschutes County Sheriff’s office.

The costs for wildland firefighting alone chokes out the state’s entire emergency budget. ODF is asking the state’s Emergency Board, which allocates additional funding outside of legislative sessions, for $40 million from its general fund, KGW reports. The problem is that the E-Board only has $43 million in its general fund for the remainder of the year, meaning if wildland firefighting gets priority, other emergency needs the state may face will be strained until the legislative sessions starts back up.

On top of that, ODF will probably need much more money this year as wildfires continue to burn. A recent Legislative Fiscal Office analysis found the department won’t be able to pay its debts by November, with an estimated shortfall of $54 million by January.

“I would like to think that future fire seasons won’t be quite at this scale, but I think the statistics tell me that’s probably not going to be accurate,” Williams told KGW. “The conditions we’ve got on the landscape are going to drive us to a place we haven’t been before.”

Climate change, overgrown forests, and people are the top causes for Oregon’s worsening wildfire seasons, according to an Oregon Forest Resources Institute report. The high burned acreage totals aren’t unprecedented; fire experts previously warned massive wildfires in the state were a disaster waiting to happen and part of a larger trend in the Western U.S. Even though the total number of yearly Oregon wildfires have remained steady over the past decade, the total amount of acres burned per year have increased dramatically.

Oregon Department of Forestry

“Factors contributing to this explosion of ‘megafires’ include overgrown forests and the effects of climate change, which have led to extreme weather, drought and insect infestations that weaken and kill trees, making forests more prone to fire damage,” the report said.

“The good news is there are many actions homeowners and landowners can take to reduce the fuels wildfires need to spread … These include clearing flammable vegetation and debris around homes, pruning or thinning trees, and using controlled burns to reduce dry brush and other fuels in forests, rangelands and grasslands adjacent to homes.”

Biden claims he’s working to raise wildland firefighter payment to $29/hr

President Joe Biden claimed his administration is working to raise the minimum wage of wildland firefighters to $29 an hour at a press conference Tuesday morning.

“What I’d like to do is…raise the pay of $29 an hour. I’d like to make that permanent for these firefighters,” Biden said at an Oval Office press conference on the ongoing wildfire response. “I look forward to this briefing from key members of my administration, who’ve been working like hell on this, and two frontline governors.”

Biden did not share details on how he’d raise the wage, and ended the press conference right after the statement.

The raise would be significant for the nation’s wildland firefighting force, the members of which usually hired at GS-3/4 with an average base hourly wage at $15.47 an hour.

FWS firefighter art

A wildland firefighter pay raise, albeit not as substantial as Biden’s proposal, has recently neared reality after being rucked inside this year’s Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill, which passed the House and was placed on the Senate’s calendar on Sept. 12, would boost wildland firefighter pay from 1.5% to 42%, with higher percentage increases going to workers lower on the pay scale, according to Boise State Public Radio.

Despite the lack of details, Biden’s statement stands in stark contrast to former President Donald Trump’s recent threat. If re-elected president, Trump said he’d cut all federal wildfire aid from California if Gov. Gavin Newsom did not agree with his policies.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Trump’s threat to withhold California wildfire aid angers state’s firefighting force

Watch Biden’s press conference here (he mentions the pay increase at ~1:08):

Ultra-early wildfire detection worldwide nears reality with coming satellite ‘constellation,’ Google says

For over half a century, the first line of wildfire defense consisted of humans perched on towers hundreds of feet in the air.

Fire lookout towers played an essential role in detecting wildfires since even before the USFS was founded in 1905. The Great Fire of 1910, also known as the Big Blowup, enshrined the towers as cornerstones of the country’s new, now discredited, full fire suppression regime. The lookouts were largely decommissioned between the 1960s and the 1990s after technological advancements in radio communication, aircraft, and even satellites gained favor over the human eye.

The tech advancements, however, lacked two things fire lookouts excelled at: spotting fires early and when they’re small. Even the most advanced modern satellites can detect wildfires only after they burn around three acres. Acreage burned is also updated only a few times daily with low-resolution images.

Google is trying to solve both those issues, not by returning to fire lookout towers, but with a multi-million dollar satellite “constellation” to begin launching next year.

“Google Research has been developing FireSat, a purpose-built satellite constellation to provide highly detailed insights, data for ecological intervention, and novel ground truth for the scientists and machine learning experts studying fire propagation and risk,” the company said.

The program, called “FireSat,” is a collaboration between Google, the Earth Fire Alliance, and Muon Space. The program is slated to launch around 52 satellites, starting in early 2025 and continuing through 2026, with the goal of providing global high-resolution images updated every 20 minutes to enable early detection of wildfires roughly the size of a classroom.

The satellites reportedly have an expected lifespan of five to seven years, so researchers predict they’ll have to launch 10 satellites annually to keep the program going once it’s up and running.

“Using AI, FireSat will rapidly compare any 5×5 meter spot on earth with previous imagery, while also combining factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather, to determine if there’s a fire,” Google said. “In addition to supporting emergency response efforts, FireSat’s data will be used to create a global historical record of fire spread, helping Google and scientists to better model and understand wildfire behavior and spread.”

Researchers also committed to offer the data as open source and for free to fire agencies and climate researchers around the world.

The news may set off alarm bells for those well-versed in U.S. wildfire history. Early-intervention has often been coupled with the fire-tower era full-suppression strategies, a major reason why increasingly severe and larger fires have become more frequent over time.

Researchers, however, affirmed the healthy aspects fire has on some landscapes. They also stressed this new technology wasn’t made with full suppression in mind, but rather as a means to give fire crews and managers the most up-to-date data in order to make the best decisions for managing fire.

“We really want to focus on reducing the size, frequency, and damage of hot and fast fires, and encouraging, as much as we can, slow and cool fires because we need a lot of slow, cool fire in order for ecosystems to improve,” said former Cal State Fire Marshal and Moore Foundation Senior Advisor Kate Dargan. “FireSat, because it will tell us not just where fires are, but also how hot they’re burning…we can develop new strategies for fire management that isn’t just ‘put it out’.”

Credit: Google Research

It will take multiple years for all the program’s satellites to launch, but it will take longer for the system to be fully operational. The first phase of FireSat will strictly be gathering data and sifting through it so fire managers can actually use it without worrying about false positives.

“In the satellite image of the Earth a lot of things can be mistaken for a fire,” said Earth Fire Alliance Chairman and Google Research Climate & Energy Lead Researcher Chris Van Arsdale. “A glint, a hot roof, smoke from another fire covering something that’s warm in the background. There are a lot more of these than real fires, and so detecting fires becomes a game of looking for needles in a world of haystacks.”

Once the false-positive problem is solved, fire managers and scientists will be able to use the data  as a visual history of all fires globally. Wildfires will reportedly be tracked step-by-step from when they start to when they are extinguished, which will help researchers better understand fire behavior on the global scale.

Many departments, counties, states and even international countries, especially in the Global South, often face hurdles to this kind of technology due to financial constraints or lack of technological infrastructure. Google researchers said they’re working with partners throughout the globe to identify which aspects of the data they most need and how to best get it to them.

“For example, in Brazil and Indonesia, those are largely regional partnerships where either a government organization or a conservation organization serves our distributor to make sure the data is actually hitting the ground and being used by the agencies themselves,” Earth Fire Alliance Executive Director Brian Collins said.

Agencies interested in joining the program’s Early Adopter Program can reach out to Earth Fire Alliance Community Organizer Ann Kapusta at ann@earthfirealliance.org or get updates by signing up at the Earth Fire Alliance website.

‘Watch our state burn’: Trump’s threat to withhold California wildfire aid angers state’s firefighting force

During a pseudo-campaign stop that functioned more as a golf course advertisement, former President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal wildfire aid from California if Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t bow to his policies, infuriating firefighters throughout the state.

Trump made the declaration on Friday during a private fundraiser at his golf club in Rancho Palos Verdes. The statement was made after Trump ranted about a nonexistent “very large faucet” in Canada holding water back from California and causing the state’s drought.

“The automobile industry is dead, the water coming in is dead, and Gavin Newsom is going to sign those papers, and if he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

Dixie Fire at Greenville, CA, 2021
Dixie Fire at Greenville, California — photo ©2021 Jay Walter.

The declaration, understandably, angered California’s wildland firefighting force. California Professional Firefighters President Brian K. Rice said the former president should be ashamed over the threat.

“Trump expressed that he would play with [Californians’] lives and their homes if he doesn’t get what he wants,” Rice said in a statement posted on Twitter. “He would rather watch our state burn in the name of his political games, than to send help if he were to become president again…It is a disgrace to our great nation and to every Californian that this man has a platform to threaten our livelihoods, safety, families and our state.”

Newsom also weighed in after Trump’s threat, calling it a warning to every American.

“Trump just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas,” Newsom posted on Twitter. “Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself.”

A fire whirl was spotted at the Park Fire in the early evening hours of July 25, 2024. ~ AlertCalifornia camera
A fire whirl was spotted at the Park Fire in the early evening hours of July 25, 2024.
~ AlertCalifornia camera

Denying disaster aid to California is a tradition for Trump. His 2020 administration initially denied a request submitted by the state during what would become its most-disastrous wildfire season on record. The administration would go on to approve the aid, but not before causing panic throughout the state driven by damage, cleanup, and rebuilding woes.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Trump administration reverses decision to deny California’s request for fire disaster assistance

Watch the full C-SPAN recording of Trump’s press conference here (he starts talking about water and wildfire funding at 1:05:00):

 

Students at California college choked by wildfire smoke urge campus closure

Many schools around San Bernardino County have closed as smoke from the nearby Line Fire blots out the sky and pollutes the air around the area.

Air quality for the area on Wednesday was recorded as “Unhealthy” at 178 PM2.5, according to AirNow. The entire county is under an air quality alert issued by the National Weather Service until Thursday morning. The fire has burned 34,729 acres and is at 14% containment as of Wednesday afternoon.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Line Fire’s evacuations for thousands hold as it burns away from San Bernardino

The hazardous conditions caused many school districts throughout the area to close for the week, including the Bear Valley Unified School District, the Redlands Unified School District, and the Rim of the World Unified School District.

California State University at San Bernardino, however, has continued to have classes, enraging thousands of students on campus.

Line Fire burning on Sept. 10 near Keller Peak. Credit: ALERTCalifornia / UC San Diego

“This fire has brought with it a surge of potential health effects, most notably to those with pre-existing respiratory issues, adding a layer of danger on top of an already dangerous situation,” a petition to close the campus, which has reached over 3,000 signatures, said. “As per the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), exposure to such particles can cause respiratory symptoms and aggravate lung and heart conditions.”

The EPA attributes numerous health effects to short-term wildfire smoke exposure, including:

  • Heart failure
  • Heart attack
  • Stroke
  • Increased risk of emergency room visits and hospital admissions
  • Bronchitis
  • Reduced lung function
  • Increased risk of asthma exacerbation and aggravation of other lung diseases

“It’s distressing that amidst these severe conditions, the campus remains open, forcing students and faculty members to risk their health,” the petition said. “We should not have to choose between our health and our education. Safe and quality education should not involve risking your wellbeing.”

Recent Washington Department of Ecology research found air pollution, driven by wildfire smoke, shortened life expectancy for the state’s most overburdened communities by 2.4 years. Those communities also had higher numbers of deaths from cardiovascular disease.

READ MORE: Smoke reduced life expectancy across Washington

Smoke from other wildfires in the area, including the Bridge, Airport, and Roblar fires, are also inundating the area but will also act to moderate fire activity, San Bernardino National Forest officials said Wednesday.

“Smoke from fires across the region will help moderate fire activity unless the skies clear and the smoke thins,” officials said. “That would allow for more slope and vegetation aligned runs.”