The events at Fort McMurray may signal the start of yet another brutal wildfire season. The year before, 34,000 square kilometres of land burned in the Northwest Territories, in what some described as the worst fires the region had seen in decades. Last year, the military was called in to help fight aggressive fires in Saskatchewan, while Alaska experienced its second-worst wildfire year in recorded history. For thousands of years, wildfires have shaped this forest landscape.īut recently, they have become more severe. Pick a spot in Canada’s boreal forests - a subarctic swathe of hardy coniferous trees with deciduous mixed in - and chances are that it’s been on fire at least once in the past century. Serious wildfires aren’t unusual for northern America. “We need to start thinking about permafrost and we need to start thinking about deep carbon and everything we can do to inhibit the progression of climate change.” Landscape shaped by fire “This is carbon that the ecosystem has not seen for thousands of years and now it’s being released into the atmosphere,” says Turetsky. In other words, more wildfires can mean more greenhouse gases, accelerating the very climate change that may have helped kick off the fires in the first place - not to mention changing the equation for rest of the globe. The thawing soil could also trigger microbial activity, releasing more carbon dioxide and methane. Wildfires can strip away the protective vegetative blanket and release all that stockpiled carbon into the atmosphere, says Merritt Turetsky, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. The effects may extend far beyond Canada and Alaska, because of the frozen organic matter under the forest permafrost.
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