FIVE THINGS ABOUT ZOMBIE FIRES.

1 BURNING UNDERGROUND

Flames dubbed “zombie fires” that have been burning underground in the Arctic since last year were spotted reigniting on the surface by satellites belonging to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service. The fires “could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” according to the service.

2 BACK TO LIFE

The summer of 2019 saw over 100 wildfires burning from Siberia to Alaska, on an unprecedented magnitude and duration. In Canada, more than 3,000 wildfires were reported, burning up to 1.8 million hectares of land. The hot spots are seemingly concentrated in the same areas that burned last summer — Russia, Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.

3 BLAME THE PEAT

So how do these fires continue through winter months? Scientists in Alaska have observed over 35 “holdover fires” — embers buried deep in the soil in peat lands that spark weeks, months or years later — since 2005. Seven of them were visible from space.

4 DRYER SPRING

Contributing to the problem is the unusually warm and dry spring in Arctic regions this year. “That will have led to a lot of drying, making the peat soils ripe to burn,” Mike Waddington, an expert on watershed ecosystems at Mcmaster University told AFP. “Fire managers noted increasing occurrences where fires survive the cold and wet boreal winter months by smouldering, and re-emerged in the subsequent spring,” the Alaska Fire Science Consortium stated in its spring newsletter.

5 PERMAFROST FEARS

Scientists fear that the blazes could cause permafrost in the Arctic to melt, which would in turn release swaths of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, destabilize glaciers and increase the sea level.