Alaska wildfire history Layers of peat, thick soils built from partly decayed plants, stored tiny charcoal traces across northern Alaska, and a new paper shows how those traces track wildfire change.<\/p>\n By pairing peat layers with satellite records, Angelica Feurdean, a senior researcher at Goethe University<\/a> in Germany, tracked the surge after 1950.<\/p>\n Field teams from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF<\/a>) pulled nine cores about 20 inches deep along Alaska\u2019s Dalton Highway. With that long record in hand, the next clue came from changes in soil moisture and plant cover.<\/p>\n For the first two thousand years of the record, fires stayed scarce across tundra north of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska<\/a>.<\/p>\n Charcoal specks in the older layers showed long gaps between burns, even when soils dried modestly around A.D. 1000 to 1200.<\/p>\n After that short bump, the signal faded again and stayed low for about 700 years, matching a long stretch of fire absence.<\/p>\n \u201cThe interlinked changes across millennia mean recent fires are indicators of a system undergoing rapid transformation,\u201d said Feurdean.<\/p>\n Why soils dried out<\/p>\n Warming pushes the ground to hold less water, and that dryness gives sparks a better chance. As permafrost, ground that stays frozen for at least two years, thaws, water drains deeper and soils dry<\/a>.<\/p>\n By mid-century, peat surfaces reached extreme dryness at multiple sites, and fire activity climbed higher soon after.<\/p>\n Once peat surfaces dry out, lightning or a stray ember can drive flames across ground that used to resist burning.<\/p>\n Shrubs drive Alaska wildfires<\/p>\n Shrub growth has turned parts of the tundra from sparse grass into thicker, woodier patches that catch fire.<\/p>\n Woody encroachment in the study area favored Ericaceous shrubs, low woody plants in the heather family, which burn<\/a> readily when dry.<\/p>\n More shrubs meant more above-ground fuel, and the peat cores showed their rise lined up with the fire spike.<\/p>\n That extra fuel matters most during hot, dry summers, because flames can move through brush that once stayed too wet.<\/p>\n Satellites confirm the surge<\/p>\n Modern satellite records back up the charcoal signal and show frequent burns across Alaska\u2019s North Slope since the late 1960s.<\/p>\n Using the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center dataset<\/a>, they matched burn perimeters to nearby core sites.<\/p>\n Several periods stood out in the satellite record, with clusters of fires in the 1990s and again in the 2000s-2010s.<\/p>\n Still, satellites cover only recent decades, so the peat record<\/a> sets a baseline for judging how unusual today is.<\/p>\n When fires burn hotter<\/p>\n Size alone did not explain the charcoal patterns, because some of the biggest modern fires left surprisingly weak charcoal traces.<\/p>\n High heat can consume plants almost completely, turning more plant material into ash and leaving less charcoal to settle later. The pattern may indicate a shifting fire regime, with fires now burning much hotter.<\/p>\n Hotter burns also muddy the long record, since a severe fire can erase its own charcoal signature.<\/p>\n Carbon stored underground<\/p>\n In the Arctic, thick soils can lock away carbon for centuries, so fires here carry a global impact. Some Arctic wetlands stack fuel over centuries, and these peatlands<\/a>, wetlands built from partly decayed plants, can smolder underground.<\/p>\n During 2007, the Anaktuvuk River fire<\/a> in Alaska burned about 401 square miles, releasing roughly 4.6 billion pounds of carbon.<\/p>\n More frequent tundra fires can turn stored soil<\/a> carbon into air pollution and heat-trapping gases, raising the stakes well beyond Alaska.<\/p>\n Risks beyond the tundra<\/p>\n Smoke from far-north fires can travel hundreds of miles, and people downwind still breathe those particles.<\/p>\n Burning into thick organic soils adds extra fuel, so a single tundra fire can smolder and smoke for days.<\/p>\n Remote terrain limits firefighting options, and crews often protect roads, pipelines, and camps rather than chase every flame.<\/p>\n Afterward, burned ground absorbs more sunlight, which can speed thaw and keep future summers drier in the same spot.<\/p>\n Future of Alaska wildfires<\/p>\n Long records help land managers stop treating Arctic fires as rare surprises and start planning for regular seasons.<\/p>\n Combining peat histories with modern maps lets UAF scientists flag places where dry soils and shrubs make the next ignition likely.<\/p>\n Better monitoring of soil moisture and shrub cover can guide staffing plans and protect key sites during lightning storms.<\/p>\n Even with smarter planning, cutting greenhouse gas emissions remains the only way to slow the drying that fuels this new fire era.<\/p>\n Across peat layers and satellite maps, tundra fire now runs on dry ground and woody fuel that once stayed limited.<\/p>\n Future work will track whether hotter burns keep reducing charcoal signals, which could hide the true scale of coming fires.<\/p>\n The study is published in Biogeosciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wildfires in Arctic Alaska now outrun anything the region has seen in the last 3,000 years, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-479669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n ![\"EarthSnap\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/earthsnap-banner-news.webp.webp\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n