"Slow-Motion Ragnarok" - Canada's Fire Season Ends W. 45.7 MIllion Acres Burned - Twice The Area Of Portugal

[hatrack]

Canada’s extraordinary year of wildfire finally appears to be slowing down, leaving behind a weighty legacy of charred northerly forests, acrid smoke and a huge pulse of carbon emissions that will have reverberations for the climate around the world.

Fire ravaged Canada in 2023 like no other year, by a stupendous margin. A record 45.7m acres (18.5m hectares) went up in flames, an area about twice the size of Portugal, shattering the previous annual record nearly three times over. From the spring onwards, more than 6,500 fires sprang up, unusually, across the whole country, tearing through Nova Scotia in the east to British Columbia in the west.

The fires were largely centered on Canada’s vast boreal forests, a trove of habitat for creatures such as moose, bears and songbirds and a crucial carbon bank that blankets an area larger than India, representing about a quarter of the world’s remaining intact forest. Most of the blazes were in remote areas – but there were two firefighter deaths in July and numerous evacuations, most memorably the 20,000 citizens of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, who had to flee their homes in August as multiple fires converged upon the city.

Fire has always been a feature of Canada’s forests but experts say this year was not only a staggering departure from previous norms but also a grave omen of the sort of conditions that will be wreaked by the climate crisis, which is helping spur larger, fiercer wildfires through elevated temperatures and altered rainfall patterns. “It has been an exceptional, epic year,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian at Arizona State University. “We are watching mythology become ecology – it’s a slow-motion Ragnarök. We’ve had ice ages in the past but we are now living through what I call the ‘pyrocene’. Imagine an ice age but instead of ice as a forming feature, we have fire. “This is clearly a case of climate change adding energy to the system, magnifying the boom and bust of the boreal forest. We may be witnessing a change of state, a change in the character of this environment.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/canada-wildfire-record-climate-crisis

[patphil]

1. Equivalent to 71,406 square miles. That's bigger than North Dakota.