Earth's Fire Element is Flexing its Muscles

Of Earth's primary elements, fire is notoriously unpredictable and difficult to manage and now global warming is making it even more so

Aug 04, 2023

Hiya!

According to some holistic philosophies, the Earth is made up of four primary elements: Air, Fire, Earth, and Water. All are considered powerful forces that can either care for and nurture all living things on the planet or create legendary, unconscionable damage. Lately, we’re discovering just how incredibly mighty these elements can be.

While massive flooding and droughts continue to appear in news headlines, Fire is the one getting most of the attention these days. Wildfires are a problem across the planet, as they grow in both intensity and frequency, leading some people to refer to “Summer” as “Fire Season,” and I can understand why. You will, too, after I tell you about two bizarre, even mythical, phenomena the Fire element is capable of.

Zombie Fires

Remember the good ol’ days when wildfires were quickly contained? I was friends with some wildland firefighters back in college who’d spend their summers fighting fires in Oregon’s forests. Now, a little over a decade later, wildland fire fighting is anything but straightforward. Fires aren’t just becoming more intense — they’re getting sneaky.

As global temperatures rise, they clear the way for wildfires to spread further toward the North and South poles. The Arctic in the north is already heating nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, a phenomenon called Arctic amplification — and the fires there are burning far more than surface vegetation like trees and plants.

Research published in Science near the end of 2022 shows that fires are moving underground. The study focuses on the extraordinary fire activity in Siberia near the Arctic, where between 1982 and 2020, fires burned nearly 23 million acres. That in itself is wild, but… 28 years is a pretty long time.

What really caught the researcher’s attention was that nearly half of that acreage burned in 2019 and 2020. Even further, the fires were smoldering underground and earned the name “zombie fires.”

How Do Zombie Fires Work?

Here’s how zombie fires work. See, warming global temperatures dry out the Arctic’s organic-rich soil, which is the perfect fodder for a smoky, slow-burning fire. The drier the soil, the deeper the fire can grow, which makes it especially difficult for firefighters to extinguish or even tame. Underground fires are also expensive because they require more resources for longer periods.

The fires in Canada this year? As of writing this, there are nearly 900 wildfires currently burning throughout Canada, and so far, about 24.7 million acres (10 million hectares) have burned. And experts warn that we’re only about halfway through the fire season, I mean, Summer.

Well, guess what? Canada, especially Alberta, has an abundance of carbon-rich peatlands, which not only fuel these underground fires but also make the ground unstable. As you can imagine, this makes it even more challenging (and dangerous) for firefighters to reach, let alone put out. They can’t stand near it without risking the ground falling in, and you can forget about using any heavy machinery. (And water itself isn’t exactly lightweight in large quantities.)

As if that’s not just fantastic enough, these smoldering blazes didn’t just earn the name “zombie fires” because they’re underground. Nope. Like zombies, these underground soil fires are notoriously difficult to kill — even when they look dead.

A different study, this one from 2021, about the Siberia fires, discovered the fires smolder deep and silently throughout the Winter, then reignite when the temperatures rise in the Spring.

And that, my friend, is why they’re called zombies.

Fire Tornados

Hold on to your hat because zombie fires aren’t the only escalation Earth fire element has in store. Because, as it turns out, tornados generated by a wildfire are real. They were once considered a myth until a man named Tom Bates captured one on video in 2003 while standing on a suburban rugby pitch just outside Canberra, in southeast Australia.

It was January, summertime in Australia, and almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celcius) when Bates captured the fire tornado on his camcorder — because, you know, 2003 was before cell phones — and even though it was only four in the afternoon, the sky was so thick with smoke that it looked like nighttime.

The fire happened during a particularly horrendous week of light-caused fires that destroyed 500 homes, injured over 400 people, and killed 4. I’ve posted his video below, where Bates can be heard saying, among other things, “This is bad news. It’s like a big fireball tornado,” after a bright flash combines with a funnel cloud whirling directly over the fire whipping the fire into the tornado.

Later estimates suggest the roughly 300 acres (over 120 hectares) ignited within the tenth of a second that blinding flash in the video lasted. Experts refer to events like this as a “flashover,” and Bates happened to document the most dramatic one ever observed. Since then, it’s taken years for Australian fire experts to analyze and fully understand what happened that day.

Ultimately, scientists determined that a fire tornado was the wayward offspring of a pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorm — which NASA calls the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”

Removing the “pyro,” a typical cumulonimbus cloud is the massively tall, wall-like cloud associated with thunderstorms. They can reach five miles into the sky and are known for bringing tremendous wind, rain, and thunderbolts. Toss in some fire and smoke, and you get the pyrocumulonimus system, which NASA describes as,

“an explosive storm cloud created by the smoke and heat from fire, and which can ravage tens of thousands of acres. And in the process, ‘pyroCb’ storms funnel their smoke like a chimney into Earth's stratosphere, with lingering ill effects.”

Both pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms and fire tornadoes are created by high-intensity wildfires burning on hilly terrain during super hot days, further fueled by high-pressure systems and likely the superheated steam from the fires.

Umm. No thanks.

Perspective Shift

I don’t know what’s more terrifying, zombie fires or fire tornadoes. Both sound more like fiction than actual acts of nature right here on Earth, or at the very least, phenomena that might have happened long before the human species evolved. Like, I picture fire tornados as something the dinosaurs would have to deal with in some Jurassic Park remake.

But on a more serious note, these incredible forces of Nature are just a taste of what’s to come if we don’t make some drastic changes — and soon. Before, experts didn’t think fire tornados or zombie fires would exist on Earth. Now, not only is Earth capable of creating such phenomena, but they’re likely going to amplify as the global temperature continues to rise.

Not to be too dramatic, but I’ll leave you with a quote from an article by the Smithsonian about the fire tornados:

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

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