Forest fires release brown carbon, due to the burning of biomass, and those that occur in the northern hemisphere are accelerating warming in the Arctic, which could cause even more fires in the future, according to a study published in the journal scientific One Earth.
In the last 50 years, the Arctic has warmed three times faster than the rest of the planet and it appears that wildfires are helping to drive this discrepancy. The team led by Chinese scientists discovered thate brown carbon from biomass burning was responsible for at least twice as much warming as brown carbon from fossil fuel burning.
Forest fires are accompanied by large plumes of brown smoke, formed by airborne brown carbon particles that pose a health hazardand researchers suspect it could also be contributing to global warming.
In 2017, the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long headed to the Arctic Ocean to examine what aerosols were floating in the Arctic air and identify their sources.
Scientists wanted to know how brown carbon released by wildfires affected the climate and how its warming effects compared to denser black carbon from burning fossil fuels at high temperature.
“To our surprise, observational analyzes and numerical simulations show that the warming effect of brown carbon aerosols over the Arctic is up to 30% that of black carbon,” according to lead author Pingqing Fu, University from Tianjin (China).
Aerosol composition change due to forest fires
Like black carbon and carbon dioxide, brown carbon warms the planet by absorbing solar radiation.. Since warming temperatures have been linked to increased wildfires in recent years, this leads to a positive feedback loop, the study notes.
“Increased brown carbon aerosols will cause global or regional warming, increasing the probability and frequency of wildfires,” Fu said. Additionally, increased wildfires will emit more brown carbon aerosols, further warming the Earth and “making wildfires more frequent.”.
For future research, the team wants to study how wildfires are changing the composition of aerosols from sources other than brown carbon.
Specifically, they are interested in the effect of fires on bioaerosols, which originate from plants and animals and can contain living organisms, including pathogens.
The 2021 wildfire season broke records around the world, charring land from California to Siberia, and a report released by the UN last month warned that wildfires are on track to increase by 50% by 2050. (I )
Source: Eluniverso
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