In the late 1980s, three massive fires occurred in China, Canada and the United States.
In the spring and summer of 1987, one of the largest wildfires ever recorded—the Black Dragon Fire—spread from northeastern China into the taiga of the Russian Far East under hot, dry conditions. Entire towns were obliterated in Heilongjiang Province as walls of flame more than 100 feet high, driven by 60-mile-per-hour winds, tore through everything in their path. More than 18 million acres burned, mostly in Siberia, and at least 220 people died.
Two years later, excessive heat and drought in Manitoba fueled more than 1,100 wildfires, ultimately burning 8 million acres.
But it was the 1988 wildfires in Yellowstone National Park, which began with a series of lightning storms, that captured the world’s attention. Fire chiefs initially allowed the fires to burn, as they had done several times since 1972, when the National Park Service adopted the “let-burn” policy. But as the summer developed into the hottest and driest in 110 years, the wetlands quickly grew out of control, consuming 800,000 acres—more than a third of the park—and overwhelming all efforts to suppress them.
“The winds kept coming, and the worst-case scenario happened almost weekly,” said Richard Rotothermel, then a researcher at the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory. “It was an amazing season. No one had ever seen this combination of weather and fire before.”
Rising temperatures and worsening droughts mean the world has entered an era of increasingly catastrophic wildfires.
In the three decades since those fires, hotter, drier weather has only increased the scale, intensity, and frequency of destructive wildfires worldwide. The buzz among wildfire scientists these days revolves around the rising number of “firsts” that have occurred in the past 15 to 20 years, from massive fires spawning tornadoes and firewash thunderstorms to a growing number of fires in the Arctic (including Greenland) and unprecedented wildfires burning in Australia, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
In the 1980s, when wildfire scientist Mike Flannigan conducted an investigation into a possible link between global warming and the dramatic increase in wildfires, he was on the fence. The uncertainty didn’t last long. He and a colleague in the Canadian Forest Service predicted much of what we are seeing now. However, Flannigan is still shocked by the magnitude of what is happening this year, with wildfires burning in California, Oregon, and Washington this summer and massive bushfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020.
“Unprecedented and devastating bushfires in Australia last year burned over 45 million acres,” said Flannigan, director of the newly created Canadian Wildfire Strategic Network. “Arctic fires are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases. We expected this increase in fire activity, but it’s happening faster than expected.”
Just as global warming has pushed the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point that will lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in the coming decades, a new era of megafires is ushering in. Scientists say wildfires are behaving in unprecedented ways, and traditional methods of fighting them are proving inadequate for this new reality.
Evidence for a new, climate-controlled era of colossal wildfires has been building for the decade or two since Flannigan and others made those early predictions. This year’s fires in the Western U.S. underscore this new reality. Before 2003, massive fires were rare in California. But 17 of the 20 largest fires in the state’s history have occurred since then. The largest fire ever seen in California is taking place this summer, as are the third and fourth largest.
The situation is similar in Oregon, where fires have burned more than 1 million acres in recent weeks, burning in places where they rarely burn and overcoming firefighters whose tools and strategies are no longer adequate to deal with the new wildfire paradigm.
Such firsts have become commonplace this century. The idea that a fire could spawn a tornado, as one saw in Canberra, Australia, in 2003, has been a popular pastime. Since then, many more fire tornadoes have occurred, including a large Category F-3 tornado spawned by the Carr Fire in California in 2018. That year, the National Weather Service issued a Fire Department Tornado Warning for California for the first time.
Fires shouldn’t burn on frozen tundra because it’s too cold and wet. In 2007, the Anaktuvuk Fire consumed 270,000 acres of tundra on Alaska’s North Slope for nearly three months. Tundra fires a hundredth of this size were previously unheard of. As remarkable as the Anaktuvuk Fire seemed at the time, the fire burned the tundra in the Greenland ice cap in 2017 and 2019.
Lightning triggers fires, even as far away as Alaska. But no one dreamed that a thunderstorm would produce 65,000 lightning strikes and ignite more than 270 fires, as happened in Alaska in 2015. More than five million acres were burned that year.
Humans are by far the main cause of fire in California. But it was 12,000 lightning strikes that caused the massive blazes this summer, with lightning sparking 585 fires across the state. Southern California’s most destructive fires have come earlier in the fall, when the hot, dry Santa Ana winds blew in recent years. In recent years, however, summer fires have become more frequent, as UCLA scientist Alex Hall predicted, leaving the state now facing two destructive fire seasons created in part by the growing number of lightning strikes.
As with so many aspects of the burgeoning wildfire rate, the increase in lightning is linked to climate change. Lightning increases by about 12 percent for every 1-degree temperature rise. Simple math and many studies suggest that if wildland temperatures rise another 2 or 3 degrees C, there will be much more lightning in some places in wildlands already severely stressed by drought, disease, and insects like the mountain pine beetle.
Thunderstorms created by the energy of intense fires, known as pyrocbs, have occurred in the past. But they were once rare, and few people suspected they could shoot lightning that would spark flames 20 miles from firefighters in front of the blaze, as happened in Alberta’s Tar Sands region in 2016. Five pyrocbs erupted in 2017 in the forests of British Columbia and Washington within just five hours—the mother of all pyrocb events, according to David Peterson, a meteorologist with the U.S. Naval Defense Lab. No one expected anything that produced at least 18 pyrocbs would rival what happened until this year’s fires in Australia.
The list of “firsts” only continues to grow, with record fires in Portugal in 2003, when nearly 6 percent of the country burned; in Siberia, which broke area records in 2010, 2012, 2015, 2019, and 2020; in South Korea in 2019, when the military was called in; and even in Hawaii, where the need to evacuate people was never considered serious a decade ago, as it was in Maui last year.
The new fire season means that the old forest fires will no longer be sufficient.
What is less clear is what future “firsts” will look like when the number of fires is expected to double and possibly triple this century in places where millions of people live in or along wildlands.
Wildfire scientists agree that the planet will burn more pyrocbs and fire tornadoes and larger, destructive fires in places where fire was not a frequent visitor.
Many experts no longer believe Scandinavia and the east coast of North America will be spared, as wetter weather is expected in the future. Sweden needed outside help to manage record-breaking fires in 2018. The Pinelands of New Jersey can get a lot of rain, but 10 days of blue skies, high temperatures, and gusty winds can still create prime fire conditions. People who live in the Pinelands know this all too well, based on the region’s prolific fire history.
The new fire era the world is entering means that old wildfires will no longer be sufficient to suppress flames that are becoming more numerous, hotter, and increasingly heavy in consuming areas of homes and forests. More money is certainly needed to put more firefighters on the ground and in the air. Thinning forests and grasslands and burning may well be part of the answer. But firefighters also need new and improved tools such as unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, fire risk maps, real-time warnings, smoke projections from active wildfires, and computer models that predict where fires might start.
“As fires grow larger and more intense, fire management will become even more difficult,” said Flannigan of the Canadian Strategic Network. “Traditional fire management and suppression may reach their limits in terms of effectiveness.”
Today, eight regional fire compacts cover nearly all of the United States and Canada, with states and provinces sending firefighters and equipment to other jurisdictions. However, the events of this and recent summers have shown that in a world of multiple massive wildfires, even regional compacts are insufficient. Fires that have burned in British Columbia and other Canadian provinces have required assistance from firefighters in Mexico, South Africa, and Australia. Australian and Mexican firefighters have answered California and Oregon’s requests for assistance this year.
We now find ourselves in a situation where even international cooperation—nations sharing wildfire suppression resources—is not enough. This is not the “new normal,” as California Governor Gavin Newsom and others have described. There is nothing “normal” about the new fire paradigm taking hold. Policymakers and the public believe widespread destruction will continue. But the best thing firefighters can do when a megafire burns in hot, dry, windy conditions is to slow it down or redirect it.
A few decades ago, a government policy of letting fires burn out naturally—first pursued in the 1988 Yellowstone Park Fire—seemed like a good idea. Since then, “letting fires burn” has posed far greater risks. And with increasing population and development, allowing fires to burn has become increasingly difficult, as too many people now live and work in places prone to fire. Witness the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in California, Oregon, and Washington this summer.
At a time when global warming is now a major cause of the worsening wildfire landscape, the events of this summer have starkly demonstrated that business as usual is no longer viable.