[Music] Narrator: On July 7th, 2019 the skies around Anchorage Alaska were thick with smoke.
Across the Cook Inlet,
the Swan Lake Fire had spread over nearly
79.000 acres and was still growing.
This was just one of over 400 fires that
burned in Alaska so far in 2019.
In the Arctic, fires can help rejuvenate
ecosystems and make way for new growth.
However, Arctic and boreal regions
are warming at a faster rate than anywhere else
on Earth, and hotter and drier summers are leading
to accelerated fire cycles and more intense burns.
Elizabeth Hoy: Fires in boreal forests are different
than in other areas of the world, such as those in the western United States.
One of the main differences is they have these really thick
organic soils layers and these soil layers burn.
And so you’re not just getting fires in the trees or in the canopy,
you’re getting fires below the tree itself, like in that soil layer and
that is really when you get a lot of these carbon emissions.
Narrator: Wildfires release large amounts of particulate matter
which is transported across and beyond the region following
wind patterns. This means that a fire burning in the Arctic
can impact people living thousands of miles away.
Elizabeth Hoy: Because there are these thick stores of organic material
in the soil, when they burn, they are
releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which is then causing
more warming. And that warming isn’t just going to happen in the
Arctic, we’re going to see climate change happen throughout all of the world.
Narrator: NASA is studying how a changing climate is
contributing to more frequent and powerful Arctic fires,
and what that means for ecosystems and our health.
Elizabeth Hoy: ABoVE is the Arctic - Boreal Vulnerability Experiment. And
it is a large-scale field campaign that NASA has
designed to study many aspects of the ecosystem
of the Arctic and boreal regions in Alaska and western Canada.
In addition to field observations, NASA satellites
give researchers the ability to track large-scale
changes to the Arctic over a period of time.
And it’s not uncommon for these Earth-observing satellites to be the first to detect wildfire,
especially in the remote Arctic regions.
Elizabeth Hoy: NASA does a really good job of putting
all these different pieces together. That’s the benefit of having a large agency like NASA
do this type of study.
Narrator: On the ground and in the air, NASA is working to better understand
the consequences of Arctic fires
in one of the most rapidly changing regions on Earth.