Huge ’07 Alaska tundra fire hints at climate future
Alaska’s huge Anaktuvuk River tundra fire in 2007 released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Earth’s entire Arctic tundra absorbs in a year, report the BBC and Alaska Dispatch, citing a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Though the 400-square-mile fire’s long-term effects remain uncertain, it may have been a harbinger of things to come in a warmer, drier Arctic, the researchers say. It was the largest tundra fire ever recorded, releasing carbon stored over a period of 50 years and doubling the cumulative area of Alaska tundra burned in smaller fires since 1950.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Alaska is a campfire marshmallow?
Or it was caused by something like this.
http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/environmentalist-starts-israels-worst-ever-fire-greenpeace-blames-global-warming/
Run for your lives, it’s a tundra fire! Too bad they did not have a Walmart nearby…
The fire was 400 sq miles. (20 miles by 20 miles – is that “huge”?) And it “released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Earth’s entire Arctic tundra absorbs in a [one] year”. And it released “carbon stored over a period of 50 years” . Hmmm. Time for some simple arithmetic. (50yrs/1yr) * 400 sq miiles = 20,000 sq miles. Amazing, I thought the “Earth’s entire Arctic tundra” was bigger than that! What have I missed?
More bad reporting by newspaper hacks. It seems they should have written 10,000 years – not 50 years.
“It was the largest tundra fire ever recorded, releasing carbon stored over a period of 50 years and doubling the cumulative area of Alaska tundra burned in smaller fires since 1950.”
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That’s horseshit! I don’t know how they are defining tundra, but Alaska has fires much larger than that often. My first year in Ak we had a smoke haze over the entire base, Ft. Wainwright, for over a month, because of a fire………..
1 Acre = 0.0015625 Square Miles Again, I don’t know how they are defining “tundra”, but the interior and north Alaska is basically all tundra.
2007, in fact, was a light year for Alaskan fires. 509 fires for a total of 649,411.4 acres or a little more than 1000 sq. miles. But!!, 2004 had 696 fires for a total of 6,523,182.4 acres or over 10,000 square miles!!
In 2004 there was an individual fire that burned 2004 Taylor Complex Alaska Division of Forestry – AK 1,305,592 acres……. or 2040 sq miles.
http://forestry.alaska.gov/firestats/
Also see here for recent national large fires..1997-2009…http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_lgFires.html
The area defined as tundra lies at the extreme northern reaches of Alaska. To put in terms of your home, it would be the largest fire you ever had in you ashtray.