Caption by Michon Scott19 August 2012 Intense wildfires in California and Idaho sent smoke eastward across the United States in mid-August 2012. Smoke affected air quality as far away as the Great Lakes Region, and some of the thickest smoke stretched from the Dakotas to Texas. Wildfire smoke is a combination of gases and aerosols—tiny […]
11 August 2012 (NASA) – The fires that have been plaguing Russia for months are causing smoke to drift across the Pacific Ocean towards North America. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on August 8, 2012 at 21:50 UTC. In this image a broad band of gray […]
14 August 2012 (NBC News) – Wildfires raged in several Western states on Tuesday, destroying dozens of homes and threatening hundreds more. In Idaho, one firefighter was killed by a falling tree. A fire in central Washington grew rapidly overnight and destroyed more than 60 homes, spurring the state’s governor to declare an emergency in […]
[12,588 hectares = 48.6 square miles. This afternoon, the sky in Seattle is an eerie, hazy yellow from Siberia smoke carried on the jet stream, the incinerated remains of trees and animals. This may be the most under-reported story of 2012.] By Jennifer Zielinski 13 August 2012 It may be forest fire season but the […]
MOSCOW, 3 August 2012 (RIA Novosti) – Fires are spreading across vast Siberian forests in a flashback to the summer of 2010, when the worst drought on record sparked fires that killed dozens of Russians. The total area of forests gripped by fire in Russia has increased to 11 million-12 million hectares, Grigory Kuksin, head […]
Caption by Adam Voiland7 August 2012 For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires burning around the globe. Now researchers have a new tool for observing fire. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to […]
By MARC SANTORA4 August 2012 Firefighters in Oklahoma struggled on Saturday to contain at least a dozen wildfires that have burned more than 80,000 acres near Oklahoma City. Fueled by searing temperatures and whipped by high winds, the fires forced hundreds of people to flee and had burned dozens of homes by late Friday. Oklahoma […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, www.guardian.co.uk 1 August 2012 Drought, wildfires, hurricanes and heatwaves are becoming normal in America because of climate change, Congress was told on Wednesday in the first hearing on climate science in more than two years. In a predictably contentious hearing, the Senate’s environment and public works committee heard from […]
Colorado forest before beetle infestation, September 2005 Colorado forest after beetle infestation, September 2011 Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Thomas Veblen and Bill Romme28 July 2012 A single pine bark beetle is about the size of a grain of rice. But when the beetle population swells, it can have a major impact […]
By CORNELIA DEAN23 July 2012 WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory – […] Today, as the road now known as the Alaska Highway celebrates its 70th birthday, cars and trucks flash along what Wally Hidinger calls “a very good standard two-lane highway” from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. “Our mantra is bare, dry pavement 365 days […]
