With recent news of heat and wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, I'd looked using the Nullschool Earth weather visualiser for similar signs elsewhere. The submitted article is one of the few mentions of this year's Siberian forest fires I can find. (The fires have become something of an annual occurrence.)
The Yakutia region of Siberia is under a staggering amount of wildfire. The fires seem to have been burning since May, though by both particulate and CO channels at Nullschool, have exploded in size and intensity in just the past 48 hours or so (that would be after the dateline of this article).
Several videos on the article show conditions on the ground.
I'm linking two snapshots of current conditions as noted by Nullschool, showing smoke and more specific combustion channels.
Particulate channel, shows the location generally of smoke. I’ve selected the PM1 rather than PM2.5 channel as the latter is somewhat noisier, though it’s generally what’s used for smoke tracking. Both are fine particulate matter.
CO channel, where carbon monoxide is a much more specific indication of where there is current combustion. These signal regions themselves are immense. My eyeball estimate is that the fires cover a region roughly the size of the state of Oregon.
It's possible to select SO2 and NO2 channels as well, both of which also tend to indicate current combustion, though with specificity intermediate between CO and PM1.
Massive siberian forests fires became a regular thing about ten years ago. There is a strong suggestion that artificial fires used to cover up large-scale illegal logging. Russia hangs around the top of deforestation charts for quite a few years now.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not clear how a fire would cover up a logging operation (signs of logging machinery don't just disappear). Unless there were massive corruption - which I wouldn't be surprised, but would still be saddened if this turned out to be true.
Russia has a judiciary. It can be a little random, but parts of it are good. This is definitely a country where you can bribe an official, do something illegal and then later find yourself in a courtroom with a judge who won't be bribed.
Yup that's massive. According to [1] the biggest fires in the US were the 2014 Northwest Territories fires which burned 8 million acres or ~12,500 square miles. 98,466 sq mi is more area than all of the wildfires in the United States going back to 2007 COMBINED.
That's not in the US. The Northwest Territories are in Canada. The largest fire in the US on that list is the 2020 California wildfire at ~6,900 square miles.
Note that there's the actual burnt region, and the region affected by the fire.
I'm referring to the latter, where for a region ~500 km / 300 mi on a side, there's an overwhelming amount of fire.
There's remarkably little news coverage of this, though the Siberian Times has run a few over the past several weeks. Again, the past few days' development has been immense.
It's been around for a few years, is a really powerful and useful tool, and has all kinds of features to explore.
Click on the "Earth" button for the controls.
- You can switch between "Air", "Ocean", "Chem", "Particulates", "Space", and "Bio" classifications.
- Each has numerous characteristics or channels.
- "About" has a really good primer on what's being measured and how.
- You can toggle a number of settings, including the resolution ("HD" for "high definition"). If you've got a large-screen mobile device, toggle Desktop view as well in your browser.
- The calendar/date selector allows going through history, as well as up to about 7 days future forecast for some channels.
A global pandemic, heat domes, towns in Canada blowing up in smoke, persistent wildfires in Yakutia (where temperatures can drop to −70C (−94F) in the winter)... it all seems to belong in a mediocre, over-the-top disaster movie... and yet, it's our reality.
Oil spills and leaks tend to dissipate eventually via several mechanisms. A storm will generally assist in dispersal. Given that it's the concentration of oil that is most harmful to life in the region, this is generally helpful.
Spilled oil consists of volatile and heavy elements. The volatile elements tend to evaporate, the heavy fractions eventually sink to the sea floor. (They can of course cause further damage there, as benthic damage resulting from the Deepwater Horizons spill attests.) Surface oil may also burn (as seems to be occurring here.) Some 20--40% of the mass of a slick may evaporate into the atmosphere. Some of the oil is water-soluble and will mix with the water column at depth, while 10--30% falls to or mixes with sediments on the seafloor.
Oil can also be washed onto shorlines --- beaches and rocks. Here it will mix with or coat sand and rocks. This is highly visible, but usually only a small fraction of the total spill volume. Wildlife, particularly birds, tend to be strongly and visibly affected.
At the surface, oil forms a slick. Wind and wave action tend to spread and disperse this, mixing the oil with the water column. Lighter fractions will eventually rise.
Managed responses to oil spills include skimming (booms and absorbants), burning (of concentrated oil), and dispersion (of widely-distributed oil). Skimming and burning where possible do remove the oil from the water column relatively quickly. The record on dispersants, which tend to be chemical-based agents themselves affecting sea life in the area, is more mixed. None of these methods are applicable to tropical-storm (or worse) conditions. Note that the spill in question here is far out of any possible track of Hurricane Elsa.
just what i need for my climate catastrophe anxiety...
question: is it better for the oil to burn up? i'm sure not all of it makes it to the surface, but maybe better than dispersing in the water where we'd never get it out?
In general, yes, as this rapidly removes much of the oil from the water column. The results of combustion are CO2 and water, as well as soot and partially-burned hydrocarbons. The amount of light elements on the surface and mixed into the water column are reduced, though there may still be substantial seafloor contamination from heavier components or partially-combusted material which sinks.
From the videos I've seen, I'd suspect a fair amount of natural gas in the leak, which is typical of at least some oil fields in the area. More so near Trinidad and Tobago, which is not exactly close to the field in question.
I've also read back with the last giant spill that the chemicals they use to 'clean up' really just break the oil down into smaller droplets so it falls to the floor. if that's true it almost sounds worse like micro plastics.
I don't think anyone can answer that question based on first principles. It looks like the perfect conditions for incomplete combustion with aerosolized petroleum violently mixing with sea water that's getting rapidly pushed away by the force of the explosion.
On on the one hand, it might spread out the petroleum and prevent an oil slick from forming, making it less ecologically damaging. On the other hand, it might be combusting a negligible amount of the fuel and spreading the rest as tiny particles that aren't small enough to overcome a turbulent sea and collect at the surface, so they enter the respiratory and digestive systems of everything in the gulf.
OT: There was a "Nature" two part series about horses [1] and they talked about Yakutian horses [2], native to that region.
Yakutia gets impressively cold in winter, but it is no slouch in summer, either. It normally gets up to 38℃ (100℉). Those horses take both the summer heat and the winter cold outdoors, unsheltered. That's a 108℃ (194℉) range they handle.
I guess it is downvoted because we don't know for sure whether this incident is caused by climate change, or forest mismanagement or maybe forest fire happens there every second year and it is normal.
Don't get me wrong. Climate change is real. But these blunt claims like "it was raining today and the same day last year there was no rain so we are all doomed" hurt more than help dealing with the issue.
We need more statistics. We need to make less conclusion from single incidents.
GP didn't mention global warming though. They're just observing that there appears to be an awful lot of bad things happening lately.
Re: climate change, I don't quite get the call for "less conclusions from single incidents". It's not like research is non-existent or contradictory, is it? Just a quick google search leads me to articles like this[0] saying there's well over 300 studies supporting the idea that extreme weather events can be blamed on humans.
I feel like saying "correlation is not causation" when the world is quite literally on fire is about as close as it gets to the "this is fine" meme...
> They're just observing that there appears to be an awful lot of bad things happening lately.
OK, then present statistics (not you, but everyone who try to convince climate change from single incidents).
Individual incidents only damage the cause. Fires happened all the time in the last million years. One can't come to correct conclusions about they getting more frequent from their personal observation of news feed.
> Just a quick google search leads me to articles like this
As I said, I'm not denying climate change, global warming, increased frequency of forest fires etc.
Just don't be (not you) religious pro-climate-change fanatic indistinguishable from client-change-denier fanatic. Present data, studies.
> Fires happened all the time in the last million years
No offense, but this sounds awfully like the "temperature rises occurred before" rhetoric, while ignoring magnitude[0]
Yes forest fires can be natural, but for this specific one, another comment upthread mentioned it potentially being linked to a history of illegal logging. The melting of the polar cap has been documented fairly thoroughly, and I already mentioned the existence of studies about extreme weather. We know for fact that there's a strong relationship between our polluting ways and arctic ice melting, and that there's a relationship between that and extreme weather events. Hopefully it shouldn't take a PhD to figure out irresponsible human-made logging fires + record high temperatures are a recipe for disaster(tm)
Personally, I think we're a little past the "show us the data" territory. "Seriously, WTF?" might be more in order at this point.
We mock the deniers who pick single events to disprove climate change, so we need to be held to the same standard. It doesn't matter how many crazy bad events happen, they're symptoms. You need to focus on the underlying causes; the macro trends
It was likely downvoted at the time because it adds little to the discussion. It just laundry-lists some disasters. Disasters occur every year, with the caveat that we may know about more of them for various reasons including more information being gathered and more information being disseminated.
Unfortunately, the dipshit comment (now flagged) a couple of replies above yours catapulted the other dipshit comment into upvote territory because despite its total lack of substance, people had to upvote it as some kind of political statement. Yeah, how dare this be downvoted, it's a very important comment (stating nothing of importance) about how disaster is happening everywhere all the time with zero nuance or introspection about why this might be! Le upvote!
Did you create a throwaway account just to call me a dipshit? For asking an earnest question? I was just interested in why the comment was being voted down, because I'm interested in learning more about the community's standards and moderation policies.
I'd also like to know what my comment was flagged for, but I guess that's out of the question too. It's not very fun being censored with no explanation whatsoever.
Why did you jump to so many conclusions and resort so quickly to namecalling?
The Yakutia region of Siberia is under a staggering amount of wildfire. The fires seem to have been burning since May, though by both particulate and CO channels at Nullschool, have exploded in size and intensity in just the past 48 hours or so (that would be after the dateline of this article).
Several videos on the article show conditions on the ground.
I'm linking two snapshots of current conditions as noted by Nullschool, showing smoke and more specific combustion channels.
Particulate channel, shows the location generally of smoke. I’ve selected the PM1 rather than PM2.5 channel as the latter is somewhat noisier, though it’s generally what’s used for smoke tracking. Both are fine particulate matter.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/07/02/2200Z/particulates/...
CO channel, where carbon monoxide is a much more specific indication of where there is current combustion. These signal regions themselves are immense. My eyeball estimate is that the fires cover a region roughly the size of the state of Oregon.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/07/02/2200Z/chem/surface/...
It's possible to select SO2 and NO2 channels as well, both of which also tend to indicate current combustion, though with specificity intermediate between CO and PM1.
The region on Google Maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@61.9357692,135.147793,8z/data=!...