Canada Wildfire Destruction Reaches Size Of Indiana
Depending on who is counting, the amount of land destroyed by Canadian wildfires this year equals an area as large as Indiana, measured by square miles. Another analysis rates the size closer to a much larger footprint than North Dakota’s land mass. The exact size hardly matters for the tens of thousands of displaced people and the millions affected by unprecedented air pollution caused by these fires.
The Indiana comparison comes from The Guardian.
The fires were largely centered on Canada’s vast boreal forests, a trove of habitat for creatures such as moose, bears and songbirds and a crucial carbon bank that blankets an area larger than India, representing about a quarter of the world’s remaining intact forest.
The North Dakota number is from NASA’s Earth Observatory. NASA clarifies that an exact number is hard to calculate because the fires were widespread and varied significantly. The westernmost fires were near the Alaskan border. The easternmost were in Nova Scotia. The locations ranged from near the Arctic Circle to as far south as the US border.
No one who saw the results of these wildfires will ever forget the photos of thick orange air pollution spread across some of America’s largest cities, as far east as New York and as far West as Minneapolis. One day, the air pollution level in New York City was the highest among any city in the world, including metropolitan areas of India or China, which usually hold this distinction.
Also unforgettable was a vacant Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. This city had 20,000 residents who were told to leave quickly. Ken McMullen, president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs and fire chief in Red Deer, Alberta, commented about the decision to evacuate everyone from Yellowknife, “It’s one of those events where you need to get people out sooner rather than later.”
The uncontrollability of relatively new climate crisis events is at the heart of the Canadian wildfire dangers and will not change. Most wildfires in the past, particularly in the US, have been controlled due to human ingenuity, even if the process took weeks. Ingenuity won’t work with fires this vast.
Fires that were the size of Indiana this year could be even larger next year.
