Photo: NASA map showing fires from 7/19 to 8/17/2021
It’s mostly rising temperatures thawing out frozen Arctic ground but increasing northern blazes are playing a disproportionate role. And warming has resulted in the uptick in fires elsewhere around the Arctic rim. Alaskan fires burned just 3.4% of the area but are responsible for 10.5% of thermokarst (large,round,shallow pits) in Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve. After a fire thermokarst rates are dozens of times higher than normal. The pits can flood, forming lakes that cut off oxygen to the ground and make the land swampy which attracts microbes that produce methane. Last August there were unprecedented fires in Russia’s Siberia, bigger at the time than all the other wildfires burning in the world combined. Smoke from these massive wildfires reached the geographic North Pole for the first time in recorded history.
www.greenpeace.org/international/story/49171/russia-record-breaking-fires-siberia/
www.adn.com/alaska-news/science/2021/12/13/arctic-fires-are-melting-permafrost-that-keeps-carbon-underground