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Dry, Hot Weather Ignites Big Alaska Wildfire Season

 

August 31, 2005 — By Reuters

ANCHORAGE — Successive hot summers, vast swaths of insect-weakened trees and

lightning strikes have combined to torch about 4 million acres of forest in

Alaska this summer, nearly tying the state's third-largest fire season on

record, federal and state officials said Tuesday.

 

This summer's large wildfires come a year after more than 6.5 million acres

burned last year, the most since wildfire records have been kept in the past 56

years.

 

The two consecutive large fire seasons are unprecedented, according to wildfire

managers and forestry experts.

 

" It does not happen, until recently, that we have two large back-to-back fire

seasons, " said Maggie Rogers, spokeswoman for the Alaska Interagency

Coordination Center, the consortium of federal and state agencies that manage

wild fires in Alaska.

 

Within a week, this year's total is expected to surpass the 1969 total of 4.017

million acres, the third-largest on wildfire season on record, Rogers said.

 

The large reach of this year's fires may be one sign of a major climate-driven

change underway in Alaska's boreal forest, said Glenn Juday, a professor of

forest ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

 

Alaska has warmed dramatically in past decades, and if the warming trend

continues, the trees in Alaska's boreal forest could vanish over the next

century, said Juday, who has been studying the effects of global warming in the

far north.

 

" They won't be able to grow at all. There won't be forest anymore, " he said. " It

looks like we would make a transition from forest to grassland. "

 

One reason for the wildfires, scientists say, is rising insect populations that

kill trees, turning them into dry, flammable fuel for raging wildfires.

 

Source: Reuters

 

 

a blinding flash

hotter than the sun

dead bodies lie across the path

the radiation colors the air

finishing one by one