Forest Fires In Northwest Canada Burning At 'Unprecedented' Levels
Perhaps not surprisingly then, the current Northwest Territories fires have been fueled by hot and dry weather. Yellowknife’s June high temperatures were 3.8°F above normal highs while rainfall was only 15 percent of normal. Through July 15, high temperatures have been running 4°F above July averages and the city has only seen 2 percent of its normal rainfall for the month. While these conditions can't be tied specifically to climate change, they're in line with those trends.
The fires have shut down parts of territory’s Highway 3, a main thoroughfare, and inundated Yellowknife with a thick haze of smoke and ash. The city’s 19,000 residents are also under a health warning. At points last week, the smoke plume was whisked south across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and even reaching the Dakotas, 2,000 miles away.
I went up that highway in 1975. Wonderful place, Yellowknife.
Of the 186 wildfires in the Northwest Territories to-date this year, 156 of them are currently burning. That includes the Birch Creek Fire complex, which stretches over 250,000 acres.
The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates "unprecedented" in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.
The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that's taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8°F rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.