Arctic fires could release catastrophic amounts of C02: Study

The recent fires themselves have spewed some 150 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Global warming is responsible for bigger and bigger fires in Siberia, and in the decades ahead they could release huge amounts of carbon now trapped in the soil, says a report out Thursday.

Researchers fear a threshold might soon be crossed, beyond which small changes in temperature could lead to an exponential increase in area burned in that region.

In 2019 and 2020, fires in this remote part of the world destroyed a surface area equivalent to nearly half of that which burned in the previous 40 years, said this study, which was published in the journal Science.

These recent fires themselves have spewed some 150 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, the scientists estimate, contributing to global warming in what researchers call a feedback loop.

The area above the Arctic circle heats up four times faster than the rest of the planet and "it is this climate amplification which causes abnormal fire activity," David Gaveau, one of the authors of this study, told AFP.

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Researchers concentrated on an area five and a half times the size of France and with satellite pictures observed the surface area burned each year from 1982 to 2020.