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The Wapiti Fire has burned 68,123 acres of the Boise National Forest in Idaho as of Monday morning, according to Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team officials. Aerial help is largely restricted as massive smoke plumes bellow into the sky.

The fire’s hottest spots were recorded on the eastern perimeter edge nearing the isolated town of Stanley, according to the NIFC‘s infrared imaging. Town residents are also expected to bear the brunt of the smoke from the Wapiti Fire and the other nearby Nelle, Bulldog, and Flat fires. An air quality alert is in effect until 3 p.m. Monday.

“Along HWY-21 from Lowman to Banner Creek Pass and Stanley, including the entire Sawtooth Valley, will have heaviest smoke impacts,” according to Monday’s smoke forecast. “Tomorrow into early mid-week, warming and drying conditions may lead to more active smoke production.”

Operations Section Chief Travis Lipp said helicopters were briefly able to assist with suppression efforts after the wildfire became significantly more active Sunday afternoon. A hotspot threatened to push eastward toward Highway 21 near Stanley, but two Type 1 helicopters dropped water to cool the fire’s edge.

Officials considered also ordering scooper planes to the fire, but smoke plumes and subsequent poor flying conditions forced officials to hold off on that order. Multiple recons, three Type 1 helicopters, and  scoopers are on standby to assist with suppression efforts, but will have to wait until conditions clear up. Smoke forecasts indicate the plumes won’t let up for days.

Structures in Stanley are being prepared for future burnout operations as officials prepare for potential northwest winds pushing smoke and flames even closer to the community.

“Those locally probably noticed some increased fire activity Sunday afternoon in the homestead area,” said Operations Section Chief Travis Lipp in a video Monday. “Crews were able to start putting fire on the ground along highway 21 and around the homestead community. That was continued on through the night into the early hours of this morning until conditions moderated. Today, we’re looking at continuing those burning operations when conditions allow.”

The Red Cross of Idaho and East Oregon opened a shelter in Stanley for Custer and Boise county residents displaced by the fire, along with meals and emotional support. The shelter is at the Stanley Community Center, 510 Eva Falls Ave.

The lightning-caused Fish Creek Fire has burned nearly 8,000 acres of Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest and triggered pre-evacuation notices as of Thursday morning. The wildfire’s total acreage has nearly quadrupled since Monday.

Officials first reported the fire on Aug. 17 at just five acres, but quickly ballooned to 2,250 acres on Monday. USFS officials blame high winds for the spread, and warn the fire may grow even more.

“Fire managers are expecting significant growth again on the Fish Creek Fire [Thursday] afternoon with increased winds and warmer temperatures,” the national forest’s Facebook account posted. “The fires increased growth continues to produce heavy, dense smoke creating limited visibility on US HWY 26/287. Please drive slowly and cautiously in the area with your headlights on.”

Fire danger rating for the national forest and the nearby Grand Teton National Park has been listed as “High” since July 9. A CIMT was ordered and will provide command-and-control infrastructure.

• Clearwater Fire – Burned 1,966 acres since July 19 and sits at 75% containment.
• Leeds Creek Fire – Burned 780 acres and sits at 70% containment.
• Merna Butte Fire – Burned 153 acres and sits at 50% containment.
• Cottonwood Creek Fire – Burned seven acres and sits at 0% containment. It is burning six miles southwest of the Fish Creek Fire.

Hazy sunsets across Europe have record-breaking wildfires burning in Western Canada to blame, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).

Wildfire smoke from Canada has been crossing the North Atlantic since Aug. 10 and reached Western Europe on Aug. 17, resulting in high levels of particulate matter and aerosols like smoke particles in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, and Scandinavia.

“Evaluation of the CAMS forecasts against independent Aeronet measurements shows good agreement in the timing and magnitude of the [aerosol optical depth] evaluations at several sites, including Cork in Ireland, Camborne in the United Kingdom, and Brest and Arcachon in France,” the service said Tuesday.

The Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba recorded their highest wildfire carbon emissions for any August ever in the service’s Global Fire Assimilation System, CAMS reported Tuesday.

British Columbia and Alberta dominated emissions totals for Canada in July, but the number of wildfires and emissions increased sharply in the Northwest Territories through August following heatwaves across the region. Saskatchewan emissions are estimated at over 11 megatonnes for August alone, while Manitoba is currently at over 5 megatonnes.

The new records push Canada’s total estimated August emissions near the level of 2023, when the country experienced its highest emissions since 2023.

“As a result, 2024 is already one of the most extreme years of the last two decades for Canada and is set to be second only to 2023 in terms of emissions,” CAMS researchers said. “The total estimated wildfire carbon emissions in Northwest Territories from 1 January to 19 August exceed 70 megatonnes and are only behind 2023 and 2014 in terms of the annual total fire emissions for the territory.”

While evacuation orders remain in place for residents near a wildfire in the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira, worry now turns toward the six-day fire possibly permanently damaging a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Curral das Freiras (Valley of the Nuns) wildfire began on Aug. 14 and has since burned 3,000 hectares (7,410 acres) of forest. Regional Government President Miguel Albuquerque claimed arson started the fire, but specifics have not yet been released.

The fire continues to cause issues for the main island’s inhabitants, according to the Regional Civil Protection Service. Officials evacuated 160 residents on Sunday, but many more on the island continue to suffer from the fire’s smoke.

This article was originally written by Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor at The Conversation, and is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After more than a year of record-breaking heat, the peak of fire season is approaching across vast swathes of our green planet.

Lots of ecosystems have evolved to withstand regular fires and some are even nourished by it – there are, for example, plants that need flames to help them reproduce. However, rising global temperatures have spawned entirely new fire regimes. Not only does this make life more hazardous, it is also making climate change worse.

“It feels like we are getting used to the Earth being on fire,” say Víctor Fernández García and Cristina Santín, wildfire ecologists at Université de Lausanne and Swansea University respectively. According to their new research, this is a fairly recent phenomenon: extreme wildfires, the kind that killed more than 130 people in Chile earlier in 2024, happen twice as often and are doubly destructive compared with two decades ago.

Fossil fuel emissions have risen by more than a third over the same period. The combustion of coal, oil and gas is the main reason the world is burning more frequently, more intensely and for longer. Climate change has made typically dry wildfire-prone regions even drier and raised the prospect of extreme heatwaves. Animal agriculture and deforestation are also significant causes.

But, as we will see, our rapidly heating climate is breeding fires that are effectively laws unto themselves.

Fire begets fire

“When fires get large and hot enough, they can actually create their own weather,” says Kyle Hilburn, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

Scientists only discovered that fires could generate thunderstorms in the late 1990s, Hilburn says. His research, using a fleet of satellites launched in 2017, has revealed that the “pyrocumulus” clouds causing these storms are actually common.

Burning vegetation generates heat which warms the air near the ground. This air rises, leaving a void which cold air rushes to fill. If hot air keeps rising it eventually condenses into clouds and some of it freezes. Liquid and frozen particles collide, generating a charge which lightning neutralises.

The parched atmosphere above a wildfire may not produce rain, but the “dry lightning” it does yield will seed new fires in dry grass and brush. The air rising from a wildfire is also buffeted by winds which can make “fire whirls”: flaming vortices resembling tornadoes which scatter hot ash and spread fire further.

Fires beget more fires because of their influence on the local climate. The same is true on a global scale: as forests burn, they release the carbon they stored while growing. More carbon in the air means more climate change; more climate change means more fires, and more carbon in the air.

Russia is reporting a 50% rise in the extent of its wildfires this summer, as enormous blazes hurl smoke into the Arctic Circle. Wreathing the far north of Europe, Asia and North America is the boreal forest, one of Earth’s biggest carbon sinks.

“Over the past few thousand years it has removed around 1 trillion tonnes of carbon from the air, storing it in the trees and soil,” say Natascha Kljun and Julia Kelly, environmental scientists at Lund University.

Kljun and Kelly argue that computer simulations of Earth’s climate could be underestimating the contribution of these wildfires to global heating. According to their research on Swedish boreal forest, CO₂ emissions from burnt areas continue for several years after the flames die.

Hold your breath

Even with a warming atmosphere that turns forests into tinderboxes, a lot of wildfires wouldn’t ignite unless people started them. Some of these are a matter of negligence, like sparks from old power lines.

In South Africa, neglectful landowners that fail to install fire breaks could be sued for allowing fires to burn out of control. Tracy-Lynn Field, a professor of environmental law at the University of the Witwatersrand, believes this could become a powerful tool for limiting the number of fires that break out.

More ruthless regulation may be necessary in wildfire hotspots in western Canada – and not just for environmental reasons.

“In the last two decades, while emissions from most pollution sources [have] declined, Canadians’ exposure to wildfire smoke has increased by approximately 220%,” say health scientists Stephanie Cleland and Ryan W. Allen at Simon Fraser University.

Health experts once studied the sporadic effects of wildfire smoke – how a few days of exposure might exacerbate asthma, for instance. With communities now breathing months of harsh air under smoggy skies, researchers are braced for grimmer outcomes: impaired lung function, higher dementia risk and premature death.

Long-term exposure to wildfire smoke is a mounting public health problem in many places. It’s not just us who are struggling to breathe, though.

“[Plants] respond a bit like us [to wildfires], it turns out,” say Delphine Farmer and Mj Riches, experts in chemistry and botany at Colorado State University.

“Some trees essentially shut their windows and doors and hold their breath.”

Farmer and Riches discovered by accident that ponderosa pines in Colorado sealed leaf-bound pores called stomata in response to wildfire smoke. The trees effectively stopped breathing, halting the photosynthesis that keeps them alive.

The long-term consequences of smoky air in forests are still unclear. But, as with human exposure, the prognosis could be very bad indeed.

Wildfires have burned more Oregon acreage in 2024 than ever before.

The Oregon Department of Forestry’s Daily Situation Report for Aug. 9 estimated 1,387,541 acres burned so far. Officials expect that acreage total to continue growing as the state’s wildfire season nears its usual peak in mid-August.

The total is higher than any other year since 1992, when reliable records started. The total exceeds the previous record holders of 2020, at 1.3 million acres, and 2012, at 1.29 million acres.

The state’s largest wildfire this year, the Durkee Fire, burned an estimated 294,265 acres near the Oregon-Idaho border after it started on July 17. The fire is 97% contained and management has since transitioned back to local authorities.

“Crews will continue patrolling for any residual heat, supporting suppression repair, and mapping dozer and handlines for future repair,” the fire’s daily update on Aug. 9 read. “Firefighters and aircraft are available for initial attack if needed.”

Oregon’s next highest-acreage fires so far this year are the Battle Mountain Complex, the Falls Fire, and the Lone Rock Fire which burned 182,808 acres, 147,320 acres, and 137,222 acres respectively.

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.

“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.”