Sentences with phrase «tundra fires»
The phrase "tundra fires" refers to fires occurring in the tundra region, which is a cold, treeless ecosystem found in the Arctic and high mountain areas. It means that there are fires burning in this icy environment. Full definition
This ongoing ice retreat is spawning a variety of changes in the Arctic ecosystem, from increased parasites in caribou herds to a growth in annual tundra fires in Alaska, according to the assessment in Science last week, which reviews prior data.
scientificamerican.com
He wondered what impact soot from the fires — and others raging closer to the Arctic, including the largest tundra fire in history — might have on the ice sheets.
The MBL Ecosystem Center is involved with the Arctic Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site on Alaska's North Slope whose website has a dramatic photo and report of the largest tundra fire ever recorded on the North Slope.
Similarly, gradual productivity increases at the boreal - tundra ecotone are facilitated by long distance dispersal into areas disturbed by tundra fire and thermokarsting.
In the super-heated El Niño years of 2015 and 2016, there were late - summer tundra fires in Greenland, peat fires in Indonesia, and hardwood forests in the southeast United States that burned on an unprecedented scale.
Fires need ignition sources, and the lack thereof is probably what prevented tundra fires in the past, but unfortunately lightning is moving north with warming.
Probably the key question is return period for the fires, and early indications from the first big tundra fire (Anaktuvuk in 2007) is that regrowth is going very well (normally a good thing, but in this case it points to earlier reburning; that's important because repeated burning accesses deeper and deeper carbon).
Years after the infamous Anaktuvuk River fire — the largest recorded Arctic tundra fire — researchers have found a link between wildfires in the Arctic tundra and widespread permafrost thaw.
Box and his colleagues investigated the impact of these wildfires on Greenland by first using thermal images from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to find the tundra fires.