European atmospheric monitoring service Copernicus worried about “temperature anomalies” in Arctic regions on Wednesday, fearing the existence of “zombie” fires which would have subsisted under the surface since the unprecedented fires of the last year.
While the rise in temperatures and the multiplication of droughts and heat waves linked to climate change create the ideal conditions for the multiplication of fires across the globe, the Arctic Circle was the victim of fires of exceptional magnitude in 2019.
For example, in June of last year alone, these fires released about 50 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, the equivalent of Sweden’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. This year, scientists are therefore looking closely at what is going on there and “are considering the possibility of zombie fires in the Arctic”, according to Copernicus.
These “zombie” fires are fireplaces “that burn slowly below the surface during the winter and can rekindle the vegetation on the surface in the spring when the snow and ice disappear,” says Mark Parrington, expert for the European Service of monitoring of the Copernicus atmosphere.
Temperatures above normal in the region
The fire activity is for the moment “relatively classic” for this start of the season.
But “we have satellite observations of active fires which suggest that zombie fires have resumed, although this has not been confirmed in the field,” commented Mark Parrington. “The anomalies are relatively widespread in areas that burned last summer,” he added. If confirmed, under certain environmental conditions, this could “lead to large-scale and long-term fires again in the same region”.
Current data shows that these regions are already experiencing particularly hot and dry weather conditions for the season. Temperatures in April were above normal, especially in northern Greenland and much of Siberia, according to Copernicus.
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