2017 Greenland Wildfire Deposited Some Black Carbon On Ice Sheet; Peat Fires Would Be Far Larger
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Using a computer model to simulate how soot would have been carried in the atmosphere, the researchers estimated that about 7 tons of an aerosol called black carbon—30 percent of the total emissions from that fire—landed on the ice sheet.
This amount of carbon didn’t have much of an impact on the ice sheet’s overall albedo, or reflectivity, Stohl and Evangeliou said. The wildfire, while unprecedented in size for Greenland, was small in comparison to the wildfires that raged over mainland North America last year. (Record-breaking wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 burned more than 4,600 square miles, or 12,000 square kilometers, according to Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.) By sending giant smoke plumes into the atmosphere, the North American fires deposited much more carbon on the Greenland ice sheet than the Greenland wildfire, Evangeliou said. However, the Greenland fire was much more effective at dropping carbon onto the ice sheet, he explained.
“If larger fires would burn, they would actually have a substantial impact on melting,” Stohl said. And, there’s a greater chance of such fires, if more of Greenland’s permafrost melts and exposes peat—which is actually the early-stage material used in coal formation, and so it burns easily.
Perhaps more worrisome, these peat fires can burn underground and unnoticed for a long time. Stohl noted that smoldering peat fires in Indonesia can burn for years before they flare up again on the surface. “We cannot actually be sure that the fires (in Greenland) are out,” Stohl said.
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenlands-biggest-fire-is-a-warning-for-its-future/
