The Taiga is burning

[pscot]

The summer of 2012 has proven to be the most severe wildfire season Russia has faced in a decade. Unlike 2010, when severe fires raged in western Russia, most of the fires in 2012 have burned through taiga in remote parts of eastern and central Siberia.

On September 11, 2012, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of fires burning in Tomsk, a region of south central Siberia where severe wildfires have burned throughout the summer. Thick smoke billowed from numerous wildfires near the Ob River and mixed with haze and clouds that arrived from the southwest. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected the unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

More than 17,000 wildfires had burned more than 30 million hectares (74 million acres) through August 2012, according to researchers at the Sukachev Institute of Forest in the Russian Academy of Sciences. In comparison, 20 million hectares burned last year, which was roughly the average between 2000 and 2008, according to an analysis of MODIS data published in 2010. (There's more at the link)

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[BlueToTheBone]

2. thanks for posting

this is another terrible ecological disaster. There are so many of them.

[NickB79]

3. To put this in perspective, 7.7 million acres burned in the US this year

And this was a very, very bad year for the US fire season: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/05/796771/2012-us-wildfire-activity-moves-past-ten-year-average/?mobile=nc

So, TEN TIMES as much forest burned in Siberia this summer than in the continental US.

And virtually no news about this anywhere in the media. Amazing.

[pscot]

4. Thanks. I wondered about that

but didn't have time to follow up.