Wildfires have consumed 17 million acres in Alaska
since 1998, delivery vast quantities of CO2 into the air.
Source: AFS gallery
It’s one of the world’s most extensive and least visited ecosystems — the vast boreal forest that circles the Far North in a band of horizon-spanning conifer forests.
Reaching from the Siberian taiga through Alaska’s Yukon basin to the remote fringes of Nunavut in Canada, the Boreal world covers 17 percent of the planet’s land mass, home to raven and brown bear, complex Native cultures and unique languages, spawning salmon and Northern pike, caribou and moose and wolverine.
And it’s also one of the world’s largest reservoirs of carbon. And it’s this characteristic that has got scientists worried, especially with climate change simultaneously drying out and warming up the boreal world.
Does this immense ecosystem suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, mitigating one major trigger of global warming as it soars to the highest levels in 650,000 years. Or is the boreal forest poised to release tremendous quantities of greenhouse gas from warming peat and wildfires?
The boreal world has been burning. Consider Alaska: During the past 10 years, 4,773 fires have consumed more than 17 million acres, a rate almost double previous decades.
Several new studies focus on the role wildfires now play in boreal forests, and how that relates to the global carbon equation.