Climate change increasing severity of northern wildfires

Climate change is causing wildfires to burn more fiercely, pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Guelph.
Researchers looked at fire records kept since the 1950s and visited 200 forest and peatland sites in Alaska’s interior shortly after blazes were extinguished to measure how biomass burnt.
They found wildfires have become more severe in the past 10 years, and have released more carbon into the atmosphere than was stored by the region’s forest over the same period.
The findings cause concern because roughly half the world’s soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils. When boreal forests burn, it’s not just trees, but also moss, plant litter and organic matter in surface soils. The carbon in this matter accumulated a little bit at a time over thousands of years, but is being released very rapidly through increased burning, explained Merritt Turetsky, a professor at the University of Guelph and the study’s lead author.
“Essentially this could represent a runaway climate change scenario, in which warming is leading to larger and more intense fires, releasing more greenhouse gases and resulting in more warming,” said Turetsky. “This cycle can be broken for a number of reasons, but likely not without dramatic changes to the boreal forest as we currently know it.”