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(Trends Wide) — The ravenous forest fires in Canada have already burned almost 15 times the area that is normally burned at this time of year: about 4.5 million hectares —more than double New Jersey—, more than 800,000 in Quebec alone.
The fire season in Canada has only just begun, and Canadian authorities have warned this week that the situation will remain serious throughout the summer. If it follows the pattern of a normal year, it will peak in the hottest months of July and August.
But this is not a normal year.
“I’m not a big fan of this expression, but this is unprecedented,” said Michael Flannigan, a professor of wildfire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. “The year started with a very active, extreme and historic fire season. For much of Canada, the fire season has a long way to go.”
Flannigan told Trends Wide this year’s wildfires came “extremely soon,” especially for the country’s Northwest Territories, where 22 fires have burned nearly half a million acres so far this year alone. This figure is more than 60 times higher than the regional average.
Human-caused climate change has exacerbated the hot and dry conditions that allow wildfires to ignite and grow. In recent years, some of these fires have also shown extreme behavior, with alarming rotation patterns, creating their own clouds and spreading smoke across the continent.
“We’re seeing more and more,” Flannigan says. “And that is a sign that our fires are getting more intense.”
It’s not just about Canada. Experts told Trends Wide that parts of the United States that have been engulfed in wildfire smoke this week may see extreme fire conditions this year as well, beyond the typically fire-prone western states.
“What worries me is that we’re starting to see dry conditions in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and it’s not uncommon that once that drought forms it starts to spread,” Mark Zondlo, an atmospheric chemist and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. “And the question is: what is it going to take to stop this pattern?”
This photo shows the US Capitol in Washington, shrouded in wildfire smoke from Canada on June 8, 2023. (Credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“The Stage Was Set”
Three ingredients must be present for these large fires to break out, Flannigan said: fuel such as grass, brush and trees; an ignition source, whether caused by humans or lightning; and finally, hot, dry and windy weather.
All three ingredients were present in much of Canada this year, he added.
“The stage was set for this active fire season to take place,” Flannigan said, noting that “all indications” suggest the fires will worsen this summer.
In May, temperatures in Canada were out of the ordinary. Almost the entire country registered above-average temperatures and “numerous high-temperature records” were broken, the Copernicus Climate Change Service reported this week.
In addition to extreme temperatures, below-average spring rainfall left much of the country drier than normal, particularly in parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where fire season started early and active, somewhat without precedents.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” Zondlo says.
What the Canadian fires could mean for the US
What is happening in Canada could be a sign of what is to come this year in the United States.
Experts say it’s hard to know how severe California’s wildfire season will be after good winter precipitation, but the National Interagency Fire Center expects an active fire season in Washington and Oregon.
The northern parts of the Midwest and Northeast could also see an active fire summer. Zondlo is concerned that the exceptional start to the fire season in Canada may signal a similar potential in the eastern United States.
“Drought is starting to build here in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic, and parts of the Midwest, and all of a sudden you start to worry: are we seeing an expansion of this intense drought, and what is the wildfire risk associated with it? ?”, said. “We just had wildfires in Nova Scotia. I know they happen, but not (usually) on the scale we saw two weeks ago.”
a hot topic
For Brendan Rogers, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Center for Climate Research, one of the most worrying issues is the effect of wildfires on Canada’s boreal forests. These forests are the largest biome in the world and occupy vast tracts of the northern hemisphere.
Boreal forests are important carbon sinks, storing 30-40% of all the world’s terrestrial carbon, most of it in the soil. They play a vital role in containing the climate crisis, which makes the threats they face all the more worrying.
The cooler temperatures of the forests prevent dead biomass such as leaves and wood from decomposing, which means that huge amounts of carbon have been stored and accumulated for thousands of years deep within the permafrost.
“The problem is that as we get warmer, those microbes start to wake up more, eat up that carbon, and there’s also more disturbance, especially fires,” Rogers explains. “And fire, of course, is part of these systems. It always has been, but we are seeing an intensification of the fire regime.”
It’s a constant feedback loop. As climate change fuels more fires on the continent, it releases the same carbon and methane that warm the planet and cause the climate crisis, the effects of which are being felt everywhere.
Flannigan explained that he modeled this situation 20 years ago in a study that suggested that the eastern US and Canada could be much more flammable by mid-century than they were then.
But with the rate at which the climate is changing, he admitted, “it may be happening faster than we thought.”
“As the planet continues to warm, you would expect to see more fire episodes,” he said. “Not every year is going to be bad, but in general, the new reality is that we have to learn to live with fire and smoke.”
Trends Wide meteorologist Brandon Miller contributed to this report.
