Greenland Burns
Fires near Sisimiut, Greenland 8-3-2017 (credit: Land-imaging Camera Landsat-8)
While Greenland is mostly covered by a massive ice cap with glaciers extending down fjords into the ocean, few people realize that parts of the island have vegetation. Portions of this green, Arctic ground cover can fire and have burned.
NASA's Suomi polar orbiting satellite, used an infrared sensor on its camera to detect smoke in western Greenland where vegetation consists of dwarf willows, grasses, and mosses along coastal areas. NASA's Landsat-8 and the European Copernicus remote sensing satellites passed over the same region. These satellites captured additional imagery showing the extent of the burns ~90 miles north of Sisimiut, a town of several thousand Greenland residents. The fires were burning in peat bogs composed of semi-decomposed, dry vegetation.
Arctic tundra fires have been reported before but analysis of the satellite imagery indicated a far greater extent in 2017 than any year since these satellites began collecting data in 2000. As one of the NASA investigators said:
"...from the global wildfire science community I am a part of, we would have never thought we would need to make a wildfire history to understand the fire regime in Greenland."
Fires Near Sisimiut, Greenland 8-3-2017 (credit: EU Copernicus-Sentinel project)
Since then, two years have each exceeded being designated as "the hottest year on record" and rainstorms with lightening now frequent in the far north. Climate change in the Arctic continues to develop faster than anywhere else on Earth. This space photography will likely not be the last images taken in a 'Greenland Is Burning' series to be captured by these environmental monitoring satellites.
WHB