In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and paper birch on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The blaze burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the crowns, sending up a 500-foot column of smoke.
Years later, researchers from the Alaska Fire Science Consortium walked the site of the Yankovich Road Fire. Hilary Shook, the consortium's coordinator, used a thaw probe to measure the permafrost, the ancient frozen soil layer that underlies 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. Outside the burn scar, the probe hit frozen ground about a foot down. Where the fire had burned away the insulating moss and topsoil, it plunged at least three times deeper.
"That was an immediate effect of the fire," said Alison York, the organization's outgoing coordinator. "When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit."
As climate change fuels more frequent and severe fires in northern latitudes, the thawing accelerates. Organic matter breaks down and releases greenhouse gases, feeding a spiraling feedback loop of more warming, more fires and more lost permafrost. Intensifying wildfires in Canada released more carbon in 2023 than the nation's combined fossil fuel emissions. Many of these megafires burn in remote areas where policy allows them to burn unless they threaten human habitats.
Researchers across the US, Canada and elsewhere are now studying preventive measures such as controlled burns, faster fire detection and even sending firefighters to protect carbon stores. "We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire," says Brendan Rogers of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. "I do think that it can make a meaningful difference."
Source: MIT Technology Review · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing