OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - A NASA study has found that extreme forest fires in Canada last year released about 640 million metric tons of carbon.
That is comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation.
Extreme wildfires like these will continue to have a large impact on global climate, NASA scientists say.
The research team used satellite observations and advanced computing to quantify the carbon emissions of the fires, which burned an area roughly the size of North Dakota from May to September 2023. The new study, published in the journal Nature, was led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
They found that the Canadian fires released more carbon in five months than Russia or Japan emitted from fossil fuels in all of 2022.
An instrument designed by the European Space Agency to measure air pollution observed the fire plumes over Canada.
'What we found was that the fire emissions were bigger than anything in the record for Canada,' said Brendan Byrne, a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study.
To explain why Canada's fire season was so intense in 2023, the authors of the new study cited tinderbox conditions across its forests. Climate data revealed the warmest and driest fire season since at least 1980.
Byrne warned that some climate models project that the temperatures experienced last year will become the norm by the 2050s.
If events like the 2023 Canadian forest fires become more typical, they could impact global climate, the scientists say. Because Canada's vast forests compose one of the world's important carbon sinks, they absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere than they release.
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