Citation

Descals A, Gaveau DLA, Verger A, Sheil D, Naito D, Peñuelas J. Science 2022; 378(6619): 532-537.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, American Association for the Advancement of Science)

DOI

10.1126/science.abn9768

PMID

36378957

Abstract

Arctic fires can release large amounts of carbon from permafrost peatlands. Satellite observations reveal that fires burned ~4.7 million hectares in 2019 and 2020, accounting for 44% of the total burned area in the Siberian Arctic for the entire 1982-2020 period. The summer of 2020 was the warmest in four decades, with fires burning an unprecedentedly large area of carbon-rich soils. We show that factors of fire associated with temperature have increased in recent decades and identified a near-exponential relationship between these factors and annual burned area. Large fires in the Arctic are likely to recur with climatic warming before mid-century, because the temperature trend is reaching a threshold in which small increases in temperature are associated with exponential increases in the area burned.

Language: en