Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands, cont.

 This follows on the original post here, with more news on "Arctic fires" that are counterintuitive a priori:

Perplexity summary of NASA captured it from space, and it looks like a bad joke: fire burning on the ice of the North Pole. The scary thing is that it has been multiplying for 10 years: NASA satellites have detected a dramatic rise in Arctic wildfires over the past decade, with fires spreading farther north into icy regions, fuelled by an Arctic warming four times faster than the global average. These blazes, now more frequent and intense, are shifting from the Arctic's edges to a broad northern band, burning drier tundra and releasing ancient carbon from permafrost, turning some areas into carbon sources. Lightning ignites many of these deep-burning fires, whose smoke travels globally, worsening air quality and signalling urgent climate impacts as noted in recent Arctic assessments. 

Did you know I had a "Fire & Ice" Story Map - now gone, see indent here why, see also Day 27 here - but I have the data for the previous decades showing the history:

Here is what it looked like in detail:

click to enlarge, poster

Above was 2001-2019. Below is this month's update, in the context of the previous post's Global Peatlands: and to follow on the previous blog post's introductory paper (here), how were they affected by climate change since then?

click to enlarge, original

... What is alarming is that the fire distribution correlates in many areas with peatland distribution! The slide deck shows it's difficult to quantify, but it's a stunning result that underscores this blog post's introductory paper.

click to enlarge, top-right of  image above
turned upside-down

Even more alarming if unrelated is the North Sea: there are no islands in the central part, only Shetlands, Orkney & Faroe to the North - in sharp brown c/w fuzzy red fire tracks -  it begs the question if those are offhore platforms flaring gas and if it's legal? The 'good' news is it's regulated (Perplexity), the bad news it was at its highest in 2024 since 2007!

Who needs the failed MethaneSAT (Perplexity) when you can see the visible (and most egregious) part w NASA VIIRS satellite data...

Feel free to comment below, puh-lease steal the Geopackage here for all platforms (use symbology above) or ESRI map package here (incl. symbology), and note the Creative Commons notice at the bottom of the blog. Where to start? "Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask" about DIY mapping is here (start with: Read Me First)...