“The
Dry Land Burned Like Grass” — Siberia’s Road to a Permaburn
Hell
17
April, 2015
(Residents
of the Trans Baikal region of Russia flee through a raging permafrost
fire on April 13 of 2015. Video Source: The
Road to Hell Recorded
by: Vladislav
Igorevich.)
The
script reads like a scene from some post-apocalyptic disaster film.
Frigid
Siberia begins an epic thaw — a thaw set off by an unstoppable
dumping of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere by human fossil
fuel industry. Finally, after years of warming, the thawing land
itself becomes fuel for fires. A thick layer of peat-like organic
material that serves as kindling to the heat-dried trees and grasses
atop it.
Immense
blazes ignite in April — fully 100 days before the usual fire
season in late July. The fires explode to enormous size, doubling in
area in less than a day, covering scores to hundreds of square miles.
Residents flee or face off against walls of raging flame in bucket
and hose brigades. Military units descend on the regions affected to
fight blazes and prevent looting. The fires are freakish, starting
from nowhere at a moment’s notice. Eyewitnesses at the scene of one
fire describe the surreal situation saying: “…
the dry land burned like grass.”
(A
wall of fire confronts residents of Chita, Russia this week as local
townsfolk prepared to defend their homes and livelihoods from the
inferno. Image source: The
Siberian Times.)
But
for two regions of Russia, that’s exactly what happened this week.
In
Khakassia, a region of southern Siberia bordering Kazakhstan and
Mongolia, massive blazes ripped through a broad permafrost thaw zone,
impacting 39 villages, killing 29 people and leaving thousands
homeless. By Thursday, many of these massive fires were finally
extinguished — leaving miles wide scars over a smoldering and
blackened land.
Hundreds
of miles away in Trans Baikal, the story was also one of hellish
inferno. There, wildfires erupted from the thawing permafrost zone —
engulfing forests, burning dry land, destroying hundreds of homes in
more than 9 villages, and killing four people. One
wildfire alone surged to nearly 400 square miles in size and
threatened numerous settlements near the city of Chita.
There, locals are still fighting the blaze in a desperate effort to
preserve life and property.
(Satellite
image of fires and large burn scars in Chita, Russia on April 17 of
2015. For reference, bottom edge of frame is 120 miles. Note that
some of the burn scars in this satellite shot stretch for 20 miles at
their widest point. Image source: LANCE
MODIS.)
In
total, nearly 50 villages and towns have now been affected, 33 lives
have been lost, four more have gone missing, nearly 7,000 people are
now homeless, and more than 6,000 domestic animals have been lost to
the fires. These are the first, early casualties in a fire season
stoked by climate change that will flare off and on for at least the
next five months. A fire season that will likely see immense plumes
of smoke covering broad sections of the Northern Hemisphere, involve
Canadian and Alaskan permafrost zones, and see wildfires burning all
the way through Siberia to the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
And
so we are just at the start of a long road through another hellish
Arctic fire season, one enabled and made far, far worse by a current
and very rapid rate of human-forced warming.
Links:
Hat
tip to Alexander Ac
As
one area continues to fight blaze, communities in tragedy-hit
Khakassia show that human spirit and togetherness can prevail.
[The
winter of 2014-2015 was the warmest on record in Russia, may have
been warmest winter ever recorded in Northern Hemisphere –Des]
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