Home > Articles > Published articles > Unprecedented fire activity above the Arctic Circle linked to rising temperatures |
Date: | 2022 |
Abstract: | Arctic fires can release large amounts of carbon from permafrost peatlands. Satellite observations reveal that fires burned ~4. 7 million hectares in 2019 and 2020, accounting for 44% of the total burned area in the Siberian Arctic for the entire 1982-2020 period. The summer of 2020 was the warmest in four decades, with fires burning an unprecedentedly large area of carbon-rich soils. We show that factors of fire associated with temperature have increased in recent decades and identified a near-exponential relationship between these factors and annual burned area. Large fires in the Arctic are likely to recur with climatic warming before mid-century, because the temperature trend is reaching a threshold in which small increases in temperature are associated with exponential increases in the area burned. |
Grants: | Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2019-110521GB-I00 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017/SGR-1005 |
Note: | Altres ajuts: the Fundación Ramón Areces grant CIVP20A6621 |
Rights: | Tots els drets reservats. |
Language: | Anglès |
Document: | Article ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar |
Published in: | Science, Vol. 378, Issue 6619 (November 2022) , p. 532-537, ISSN 1095-9203 |
Postprint 17 p, 1.1 MB |