Tracing devastating fires in Portugal to a snow archive in the Swiss Alps: a case study ...
Recent large wildfires, such as those in Portugal in 2017, have devastating impacts on societies, economy, ecosystems and environments. However, wildfires are a natural phenomenon, which has been exacerbated by land use during the past millennia. Ice cores are one of the archives preserving informat...
Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
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Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
ETH Zurich
2020
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000453841 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/453841 |
Summary: | Recent large wildfires, such as those in Portugal in 2017, have devastating impacts on societies, economy, ecosystems and environments. However, wildfires are a natural phenomenon, which has been exacerbated by land use during the past millennia. Ice cores are one of the archives preserving information on fire occurrences over these timescales. A difficulty is that emission sensitivity of ice cores is often unknown, which constitutes a source of uncertainty in the interpretation of such archives. Information from specific and well-documented case studies is therefore useful to better understand the spatial representation of ice-core burning records. The wildfires near Pedrógão Grande in central Portugal in 2017 provided a test bed to link a fire event to its footprint left in a high-alpine snowpack considered a surrogate for high-alpine ice-core sites. Here, we (1) analysed black carbon (BC) and microscopic charcoal particles deposited in the snowpack close to the high-alpine research station Jungfraujoch in ... : The Cryosphere, 14 (11) ... |
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