Arctic Circle fires this year smashed a grim record

Superlatives can describe 2020's fires in the Arctic Circle.

To illustrate, the 2020 fires trumped even 2019's Arctic blazes, which were already record-breaking, compared to the previous 16 years of the satellite wildfire record. The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and the scale of the 2019 fires vastly exceeded earlier years. "Indeed, 2019 was already a big year for fires in the Arctic," said Thomas Smith, an assistant professor in environmental geography at the London School of Economics.

But so far in 2020, Arctic Circle fires have released about 35 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere than in 2019, according to data released Thursday by the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. This amounts to 244 megatonnes, or 244 million metrics tonnes, of carbon dioxide. Read more...

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