Climate Change Is So Bad, Even the Arctic Is On Fire Smoke rising from a subarctic forest fire outside the village of Berdigestyakh, in the Republic of Sakha, Siberia. From Siberia to Brazil, wildfires are moving underground and burning up massive carbon deposits. The resulting emissions threaten to worsen global warming. The Arctic tundra. The vast floodplains of Brazil. Indonesian peatlands. In these disparate locales, a particular breed of wildfire is burning up huge stores of carbon and threatening to worsen global warming. What sets these fires apart is their tendency to move below ground into carbon-rich soil layers. While wildfires generally flame upwards — quickly consuming forest and grassland — the increasingly intense blazes of recent years move downward, where they smolder flamelessly below the surface, consuming layers of organic material. These little-studied fires are becoming more common as severe wildfires have doubled in frequency over the past two decades . In the Arctic, 2024 is shaping up to be the worst fire year since 2020, when blazes burning across Siberia for several months consumed 8.6 million acres of tundra and sent emissions surging to a record . Underground fires burn low and slow, and can emit massive quantities of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases. They’re also triggering feedback loops that make vast landscapes more vulnerable to future fires. That undercuts nations’ progress on fighting climate change — progress that has already been “insufficient to keep the planet safe,” as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Sunday ahead of the United Nations General Assembly and the annual Climate Week event, both held in New York City. The Arctic Alberta firefighters responding to boreal wildfires still burning from the 2023 wildfire season in Fox Lake, Alberta, Canada, in February 2024. Photographer: Government of Alberta Johann Goldammer has studied wildfire […]