When something I thought was covered by a bunch of glaciers catches fire, something is either seriously wrong with my education – or the world. NPR (among many other outlets) reported on the wildfires of Greenland today:
More than two weeks after they were first spotted, wildfires on the western coast of Greenland are still burning, worrying local residents and drawing the attention of scientists.
Source: Wikipedia
The fires are roughly 90 miles northeast of the second-largest Greenlandic town, Sisimiut, as we previously reported. There are currently three growing hot spots, according to an analysis of NASA data by Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor of geoscience and remote sensing at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Nina-Vivi Andersen, a reporter for Nanoq News in the capital, Nuuk, has lived in Greenland her whole life and says she has never heard of a wildfire there.
“It’s very unusual,” she says, and the timing is particularly bad because reindeer hunting season just opened on Aug. 1.Satellite data suggests that a campfire or a cigarette likely started the fires.
These are burning in areas of permafrost, which is catching me by surprise. So what’s going on?
[Jessica McCarty, an assistant professor of geography at Miami University in Ohio] has been studying satellite and other data about the Greenland fires for weeks now and notes that the area appears to be home to mostly low vegetation like moss on rocks, with no trees or tall grasses. She says all signs point to this being a peat fire.
“[Peat] is a good fuel source,” she explains. “It’s essentially like the peat logs you buy for fire pits or for fireplaces.” When peat burns, the flames don’t run across the landscape quickly the way they do in grass or forest fires. Instead, peat fires smolder down into the ground, so the boundaries change more slowly and they can burn for a very long time. Some peat fires have been known to persist through winter months, smoldering away under the snow.
Peat fires also release a lot of greenhouse gasses. “Peat is basically pure carbon. So, yes, when it burns it releases a lot of CO2,” says McCarty.
What to say? Right now it appears to be a positive feedback loop, which will either end with a runaway greenhouse event (think Venus), or a termination of the loop when caches of carbon are exhausted.
But it’s all about those conspiring scientists, isn’t it?
