Unprecedented fire activity above the Arctic Circle linked to rising temperatures

• Main Authors: Descals, AdriÃ, Gaveau, David L. A., Verger, Aleixandre, Sheil, Douglas, Naito, Daisuke, Peñuelas, Josep
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: permafrost
• Online Access: https://ddd.uab.cat/record/288886

Altres ajuts: the Fundación Ramón Areces grant CIVP20A6621 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.