From Scientific American
Bush fire season is underway again in Australia, where summer has just kicked off. Yet the country is still recovering from record-breaking wildfires two years ago that killed at least 33 people, destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than 65,000 square miles of land.
How quickly the natural landscape recovers depends on the climate over the coming years. It might take a couple of decades under average conditions. But if the weather stays hot and dry—and if more extreme wildfires occur in the meantime—the ecosystem might never get back to normal.
That’s the takeaway from a study published last month in AGU Advances that examined the impact of the record-breaking blazes on the Australian carbon cycle.
These fires likely released somewhere around 186 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the research found. It’s a staggering amount—more than the entire country emits in a typical year by burning fossil fuels.
Ordinarily, it would probably take the landscape about 20 years to soak all that carbon back up again, as trees and other plants gradually begin to grow back. But climate change presents a problem: The weather in Australia is getting hotter, and the risk of drought is growing stronger.
That could slow things down—potentially indefinitely.
“It’s getting warmer and drier, so it can take longer to recover from fires—plus, you’re having more fires,” said Brendan Byrne, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead author of the new study. “That’s a concern that we’re causing permanent carbon losses in these areas.”
Under typical conditions, Australia’s forests and grasslands act as a carbon sink—they soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it away. That makes them a valuable climate resource. When these landscapes are stressed or damaged, on the other hand, they can release carbon back into the air.
Read more here.
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| A woman watches over her horses as fire approaches. Bumbalong Road, Bredbo North in February 2020 near Canberra, Australia. Credit: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images |
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