PEAT FIRES burning in northern Siberia in the depth of winter

Peat fires continue to burn at air temperature of -50C in Northern Siberia 

See the article HERE

Peat fires continue to burn at air temperature of -50C in northeastern Yakutia

Pillars of smoke filmed over the areas hit by last summer’s wildfires despite the current long spell of extremely cold weather.

http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/peat-fires-continue-to-burn-at-air-temperature-of-50c-in-northeastern-yakutia/

2 May, 2020

Wildfires ‘critical’ in Siberia and Russian Far East, up to ten times worse than last year

https://siberiantimes.com/ecology/others/news/wildfires-critical-in-siberia-and-russian-far-east-up-to-ten-times-worse-than-last-year/

Some recent videos

Truth and lies about Arctic sea ice – Jan 8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bMQHpJdmek

A discussion with Margo at the end of the melt season in the Arctic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iopEr_WDCTk

German research icebreaker Polarstern reached the North Pole and reveals the true state of polar ice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_evuKvoslcQ

Smoke covers 2.3 kilmetres2 in the Sakha Repuvlic of Siberia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jZUODjhLZQ

Robin & Margo Discuss CO2 & Siberian Wildfires May 5, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B8YOG4dF2Y``

Great minds think alike!  Margo has done her own video.

Peat fires continue to burn in Siberia under the snow in freezing temperatures

 Just like last year these fires will come to life when the snow melts. So few are willing or able to face the Full Catastrophe. They have to ignore or deny one part of the equation, whichever "side" they are on.

I suppose that is something that is wired into the human psyche which is another reason why we are doomed.

Peat fires continue to burn at air temperature of -50C in northeastern Yakutia

Pillars of smoke filmed over the areas hit by last summer’s wildfires despite the current long spell of extremely cold weather.

Zombie fires in northeastern Yakutia, Russia's largest and coldest inhabited region. Picture: The Siberian Times

Siberian Times,

27 January, 2021

The latest sighting of winter - zombie - fires was recorded on 23 January by the village of Saydy in the Tomponsky district of Yakutia, some 400km north-east of the republic’s capital Yakutsk. 

Local man Ivan Zakharov who filmed the fire at -50C told The Siberian Times: ‘It is burning near the area hit by last summer's wildfires.

'This area suffered extremely hot and dry weather. It must be either peat on fire here, or, as some hunters who noticed these fires suggest, possibly young coal (lignite).’

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Winter fire by the village of Saydy in the Tomponsky district of Yakutia, some 400km north-east of the republic’s capital Yakutsk and, below, summer wildfires in the same area. Video, pictures: The Siberian Times

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A much bigger burning area was filmed higher up north from Saydy by the village of Udarnik, also badly hit by wildfires last summer.

‘The fire is burning in the area close to the village of Udarnik. The summer fire didn’t stop.

'The filming was made in November, but as the local tell us, several fires are still active’, reported Tomponsky Vestnik newspaper that shared the video. 

Last summer Republic of Yakutia, Russia’s largest and coldest region was hit by some of the worst wildfires in history, following the spell of extremely hot and dry weather.

Wildfires were raging all around its territory, with a massive blanket of smoke visible from space in the far north beside the Arctic Ocean.

Some were in the areas too remote to reach, but many got dangerously close to populated areas like the Arctic town of Chersky, a gateway to Pleistocene Park, an experimental scientific base aiming to show how the release of carbon can be slowed by restoring the flora to grassland as it was in the era of the extinct woolly mammoth. 

 

‘We didn’t have wildfires reaching this far north to our area for many years’, said scientist Nikita Zimov, director of Pleistocene Park. ‘Last time it was this bad forty years ago in the 80s’. 

This winter is the coldest in Yakutia since 2006, with air temperatures going as low as -59C during peak days, and record cold weather holding on for weeks all through December 2020, and January 2021. 

Siberian peat fires have continued to burn after a year of record-setting wildfires in and around the Arctic Circle despite temperatures below minus 50 degrees Celsius, The Siberian Times reported Wednesday.

Footage showing smoke rising from the snow in January and November offers physical evidence of the “zombie fire” phenomenon, which describes summertime blazes that continue smoldering through the winter, eventually igniting new fires. European scientists have voiced concerns that “zombie” fires could be causing earlier-than-normal wildfires.

A local resident who filmed the peat fires last weekend said the area was located near the site of last summer’s wildfires, which took place amid “extremely hot and dry weather.”

“It must be either peat on fire here, or, as some hunters who noticed these fires suggest, possibly young coal [lignite],” The Siberian Times quoted the man, Ivan Zakharov, as saying.

Regional media that shared a video of the November peat fires said villagers report seeing still-active fires as late as the end of January, according to The Siberian Times.

“The summer fire didn’t stop,” the Tomponsky Vestnik newspaper said.

“We didn’t have wildfires reaching this far north to our area for many years,” scientist Nikita Zimov told The Siberian Times, recalling the previous surge in fires in the 1980s.

The republic of Sakha, Russia’s largest and coldest region, is in the midst of one of its coldest winters in years with mercury slipping below minus 59 C.

Scientists fear that, in addition to causing an early start to wildfire seasons, “zombie” fires could accelerate permafrost melt that triggers unpredictable damage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Russia, the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter with an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas, is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world due to its vast Arctic territories.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/27/peat-fires-smolder-in-siberia-despite-bone-chilling-temperatures-a72747

Peat fires boost global warming

This is just ONE of 61 self-reinforcing feedbacks recorded by Prof. Guy McPherson HERE

Vast Peat Fires Threaten Health and Boost Global Warming

Largest blazes on earth smolder for months in Canada and Indonesia

XiaoZhi Lim

Scientific American,

28 June, 2016

June 28, 2016 — As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. They produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities.

Although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth.”And although they look nothing like it, peat fires are the “largest fires on earth,” says Guillermo Rein, a peat fire researcher at Imperial College in the United Kingdom. Since the 1990s, Indonesia’s slash-and-burn practices that clear forests for agriculture have often led to fires that grow out of control because of peat. Indonesia has over 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) of peatland that is on average 5.5 meters (18 feet) deep and in some places up to 20 meters (66 feet) deep. “They’re very difficult to put out because they’re deep,” says Robert Gray, an independent fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, British Columbia.

The boreal forests are thought to contain some 30 times more peat than Indonesia. Because they can smolder for weeks and months, sometimes even staying active underground throughout cold northern winters, peat fires emit on average the equivalent of 15 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to Rein — carbon that took thousands of years to sequester.

Peat fires also destroy crucial habitat for endangered species such as orangutans; the haze they create has consequences for surface temperatures because it can block sunlight, and for rainfall patterns because it can disrupt cloud formation. Such negative impacts from peat fires and their persistence call for modern technologies to better detect and battle them.

WHEN NATURE’S SOLUTION DOESN’T COME

Pristine peat is protected from fire because it is saturated with water. “In a normal year,” Gray says of the peat underneath the boreal forest, “it’s too wet to burn.” But when peat dries out, either because of inadequate snow from the previous winter or from decades of deforestation and, in Indonesia, peatland draining to make it suitable for agriculture, it becomes flammable.

Nature’s solution to this problem is torrential rains that can completely flood the peatland. When they don’t come, putting out peat fires still requires massive quantities of water that can be difficult to transport deep into a forest. One manmade strategy for this is to stimulate rain through cloud seeding, a technique used in the U.S. to produce snow on mountains to ensure adequate water supply, says Watts. Guided by meteorological forecasts, pilots fly planes into clouds near storm fronts and spray solutions of silver iodide that act as dust particles for water vapor to cling to and turn into rain. Sometimes, as in Indonesia last fall, cloud seeding fails because there’s not enough moisture in the atmosphere. But with the right combination of forecasting, seeding and a little bit of luck, says Watts, cloud seeding can be effective in fighting peat fires because it can deliver the necessary amount of water.

Detecting and acting on peat fires early is “overwhelmingly important” because if they become too big no other no water supply other than rain is sufficient to fight them. Another approach to fighting peat fires is to tackle the network of narrow tunnels that deliver nutrients in waterlogged peat, but also allow oxygen to reach underground fires. Rein says some have proposed making peat less vulnerable to fire by destroying the tunnels through compression — as in Malaysia where the peatlands do not burn as much as in nearby Indonesia — but that also means destroying the ecological integrity of the peatland, creating a situation in which they lose their ability to support the forest above.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARLY

Rein says detecting and acting on peat fires early is “overwhelmingly important” because if they become too big no other no water supply other than rain is sufficient to fight them. But early detection and action are also overwhelmingly difficult. Smoke can escape from an exit far from where it was produced, says Rein, which means smoke is not always a good indicator of where to fight the fire. Firefighters typically have to look for visual cues like dying plants or depressions in the ground indicating where peat has already burned.

Satellites programmed to detect high-temperature wildfires fail when it comes to peat fires, Rein says, because peat fires are not hot enough. Rein recently received a five-year, €2 million grant from the European Research Council to develop a peat fire early warning system. He is trying to characterize the heat fingerprints of peat fires by replicating small peat fires in the laboratory and using infrared cameras to record the heat emitted. He hopes to use his findings to calibrate satellites specifically for peat fires, just as some motion sensors are calibrated to detect infrared radiation unique to humans.

Rein is also collecting the gases produced from his experiments and analyzing them for patterns that could become telltale warning signs of a growing peat fire. For example, the ratios of carbon monoxide or volatile organic compounds to carbon dioxide can be used to tell the difference between emissions from peat fires and those from combustion engines or power plants. These patterns could then be applied to handheld gas sensors or gas analyzers placed in drones, airplanes or buildings in nearby villages and cities to help detect peat fires.

ADDING FIRE RETARDANTS

Once found, one problem to putting out peat fires is that peat soil repels water when it gets very dry, says Watts. Think of how water pools on top of the soil in a potted plant that has been neglected for too long. Water has to be able to break through the soil’s surface to get to the underground fires.

Peat fires in one area treated with Peat FireX were put out and were still extinguished eight days later, while adjacent, untreated areas continued to smolder.Adding a fire retardant to the water might help make water more effective at this. One example is Peat FireX, a plant-based powder developed in 2012 by Steve Sinunu, CEO of Texas-based EnvironX Solutions. When dissolved in water, it disrupts the strong hydrogen bonds between water molecules, making it easier for the water to penetrate soil. As the solution moves into the soil, it coats the peat to protect it from fire. When it reaches the fires, a chemical reaction is triggered within the solution that quickly absorbs heat from the fires, cooling and extinguishing them. In 2014, tests in Malaysia by EnvironX showed that peat fires in one area treated with Peat FireX were put out and were still extinguished eight days later, while adjacent, untreated areas continued to smolder.

After use, Sinunu says, Peat FireX breaks down in the soil to become a fertilizer; the Louisiana Office of Agriculture and Forestry’s Fire Protection Branch, which uses Peat FireX in firefighting, has written that a “factor that should be noted is its environmentally friendly base. The by-product remaining from the usage of the product is basically a ‘nitrogen’ fertilizer.” Earlier this year, the Indonesian government adopted Peat FireX as a weapon against peat fires, according to Steve Sinunu and an independent company in Singapore who helped connect EnvironX with the Indonesian government.

While such efforts may prove to be promising solutions once peat fires have started, they do not get to the root of the problem, especially in places such as Indonesia. There, economic solutions will be needed to provide residents with alternatives to using fire to clear land for agriculture. But in a future where climate change will continue to create conditions better suited for fire, it will likely take a combination of improved prevention measures, detection and firefighting activities to combat these unseen fires. 

Peat fires in Siberia chronicled

This article is from October last year but worthwhile reading, especially for the photos. You can see what a peat fire looks like.

Warning to Putin over wildfire 'catastrophe' with claim officials undercount forest infernos

'All forest wildfires extinguished' in Siberian Federal District, say officials, but peat flames still raging.

By Olga Gertcyk

SiberianTimes,

02 October 2015

'Right now, thousands of hectares of peat are burning in the Kabansky district of Buryatia.' Picture: Anna Шogorodnik

Greenpeace used a meeting with President Vladimir Putin to launch a scathing attack on regional officials over the failure of stem the summer wildfires, and alleged that they underreport the affected areas by up to 40 times. The warning came as volunteers are fighting peat fires burning in the Republic of Buryatia in Siberia after a scorching hot summer. 

The onslaught came from Sergey Tsyplenkov, executive director of Greenpeace Russia, during a session of the Council for Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights. 'Since 2010, there was not one year when the fire danger season did not turn into a catastrophe,' he told the president. 'Right now, thousands of hectares of peat are burning in the Kabansky district of Buryatia.' 

He was highly critical about the situation in Buryatia, a region on the shore of Lake Baikal, which has faced an unprecedented challenge from wildfires, which some scientists blame on global warming. 

'In Buryatia, the authorities did not react in time to the sharp deterioration of the fire situation -and persistently underestimated area of fire,' he said. They failed to deploy the necessary fire fighting manpower and equipment, he alleged. 'The area of fires was undercounted up to 40 times.'

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'On September 27, our group of volunteers, SOS Baikal Buryatia, spent 10 hours in Kabansky district to localise the burning peat bogs along the M55 federal highway.' Pictures: Michik Tsoktoyev, Arkady Zarubin, Dora Khamaganova

Previously Greenpeace has claimed satellite images showed between 1.2 million and 1.5 million hectares on fire this summer in Buryatia and neighbouring Irkutsk region. Officials statistics by region were 597,000 hectares and 374,000 hectares respectively. He also said the Emergency Situations Ministry failed to abide by agreements with regions. 

'Fire extinguishing mostly involves volunteers,' he said. One Buryatian official said around 1,400 hectares of peat were ablaze this week, an increase on last year when 400 hectares were extinguished. 

Andrei, a resident of Kamensk, said: 'Every day we go to our dacha there is a lot of smoke moving towards the village and further to Ulan-Ude.' He warned of the threat to road and rail links.

Nikolai Yuganovich, from Kabansk, said: 'Every now and then when the wind is blowing from there, we have lots of smoke. We can't even open a window during summer. I don't know if they're extinguishing anything, they put it on paper but you can't really see them extinguishing. It's been burning pretty bad over the past two years. We're talking to everyone we can, but there aren't too many changes. There are no results.' 

Yevgeny, a resident of Kabansk, expressed fears for children's health and said: 'People who drive on M55 highway say there is no visibility. The fire is close to the highway and railway. A true threat to life. Wires have burnt out.'

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'It's been burning pretty bad over the past two years.' Pictures: Anna Ogorodnik, Dora Khamaganova, Michik Tsoktoyev, Arkady Zarubin

Dora Khamaganova said: 'On September 27, our group of volunteers, SOS Baikal Buryatia, spent 10 hours in Kabansky district to localise the burning peat bogs along the M55 federal highway.

'Everyone was tired and wanted to get home as soon as possible. My throat was sore, eyes were painful. And I'm quite healthy, travel across Buryatia all the time, but how have these people been living for two years in this hell? How can they keep living like this? What about pregnant women, elderly, children?'

Ministry of Emergency responds that they begin to help only when there is a threat to settlements and people. Spokeswoman Radna Podprugina said they act 'when fire comes close to residential areas and industrial facilities. In line with federal legislation, our responsibility is to extinguish fire in residential areas, including forests in residential areas.'

On 3 October volunteers from Ulan-Ude plan the next expedition to extinguish burning peat in Kabansk district.