A massive wildfire raging in the heart of Canada’s tar sands region has forced 88,000 people from their homes, scorched more than 1,600 buildings,
and caused several fossil fuel companies to reduce operations and shut down pipelines. The fire — fueled by above-average temperatures and dry conditions linked to climate change — burned through more than 330 square miles of land in Alberta in just a few days. Now, scientists are warning the fire, and the many others like it that Canada has experienced in recent years, could unlock vast reserves of CO2 stored in the region’s underlying permafrost. Fire destroys the protective layer of vegetation that keeps permafrost frozen, and warm conditions spur microbial activity, generating CO2 and methane emissions. “This is carbon that the ecosystem has not seen for thousands of years and now it’s being released into the atmosphere,” Merritt Turetsky, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the New Scientist.
Reuters