Dormant ‘zombie fires’ are burning in the Arctic again

Fierce fires that have lain dormant for months are igniting once again across the Arctic region.

The so-called “zombie fires,” which are remnants of record blazes seen last year, may be reemerging due to an unusually warm and dry spring.

As previously documented in other cold regions, such as Alaska, the infernos survive underground during winter and then reignite in spring.

The EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is tracking the fires via satellite.

“We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘zombie’ fires might have reignited,” said CAMS senior scientist Mark Parrington.

The Arctic is one of Earth’s most rapidly warming regions and experienced unprecedented wildfires in 2019.

Areas of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland were engulfed in flames and smoke, largely due to hot weather and a spate of dry storms.

In Russia alone, an estimated 3.3 million hectares of remote forest burned in 2019 – equivalent to more than six million football fields.

Hot spots for recent zombie fires appear to cover many of the same regions that burned last year.

“We may see a cumulative effect of last year’s fire season in the Arctic which will feed into the upcoming season, and could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” Parrington said.

Zombie fires smolder underground for months, mostly in peatlands – large areas of wetland made up of ancient, decomposed plants.

They flare up again when the weather warms up, earning them the moniker zombie after the living-dead creatures of science fiction.

“It really does describe what these fires do,” said Dr. Thomas Smith, an environmental scientist the London School of Economics.

“They recover and they’re difficult to kill.”

The appearance of zombie fires in the Arctic may signal an imminent return to the huge blazes seen there last year.

Melting permafrost in these icy regions threatens to release gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Last year’s Arctic blazes were unprecedented, releasing an estimated 50 megatons of carbon dioxide in June and 79 megatons in July.

Together, that’s equal to the exhaust fumes belched out by 36 million cars.