A post-fire area of the Sierra Nevada mountains with very little conifer regeneration. Credit: Joseph Stewart, USGS/UC Davis In the aftermath of megafires that devastated forests of the western United States, attention turns to whether forests will regenerate on their own or not. Forest managers can now look to a […]
Lightning, not arson, caused most Victorian bushfires last summer. Credit: Twitter As last summer’s horrific bushfires raged, so too did debate about what caused them. Despite the prolonged drought and ever worsening climate change, some people sought to blame the fires largely on arson. Federal Coalition MPswere among those pushing […]
Bushfires that have burned more than half of UNESCO world heritage-listed Fraser Island are suspected to have been started by an illegal campfire Australian firefighters have managed to control a bushfire that burned more than half of the UNESCO world heritage-listed Fraser Island, around two months after a suspected illegal […]
This year’s aggressive fire season wiped out a record number of the endangered birds, as well as a facility wildlife biologists use to track and care for them. PHOTOGRAPH: DEREK NEUMANN/GETTY IMAGES EARLY ON A September morning, with the smell of smoke in the air as a wildfire raged five miles […]
There have been more fires in the Brazilian Pantanal in the first 10 months of 2020 than in all of 2019 A record high number of fires scorched Brazil’s Amazon and Pantanal wetlands last month, official data showed on Sunday, as deforestation and climate change wreaked havoc on some of […]
Flames from the Glass Fire burn a truck in a Calistoga, Calif., vineyard Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) Red flag warnings of extreme fire danger subsided, but warm and dry weather continued to challenge firefighters battling more than two dozen blazes across California on Saturday as the state […]
42,000-foot plumes of ash. 143-mph firenadoes. 1,500-degree heat. These wildfires are a new kind of hell on earth, and scientists are racing to learn its rules. “We’re running 400 to 500 fires a year. In the heat of summer, five or six a day—and most you’ll never see,” says CalFire […]
They might share the same name, but ash produced in the western wildfires is a very different hazard than ash produced in explosive eruptions. Terra/MODIS image of the wildfires across California, Oregon and Washington on September 10, 2020. Credit: NASA. The western United States is on fire. Large swaths of Oregon, […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain People are starting almost all the wildfires that threaten U.S. homes, according to an innovative new analysis combining housing and wildfire data. Through activities like debris burning, equipment use and arson, humans were responsible for igniting 97% of home-threatening wildfires, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team […]
Californians woke up to an alien-looking sky this morning, Wednesday, September 9, 2020. Dense smoke and ash from the ongoing wildfires have been blown high into the upper atmosphere, blocking nearly all sunlight. This is due to extremely intense fire updrafts, according to climate scientist Daniel Swain. He said on Twitter that […]