Sidney , Australia (CWBN)_The uncommon nature of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires may have indicated the beginning of a new fire-fuelled “ice age” and the world seems to have “crossed a threshold” to a more hazardous future, a global fire historian says.
Emeritus Professor Stephen Pyne at Arizona State University is a former firefighter in the US who has earlier studied Australia’s fires for his 1991 book Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia.
Pyne said the 2019/2020 blazes, which shredded through 24 to 40 million hectares of bushland across manifold states and terrains, indicated the start of a global year of fires.
“I do think there will be a legacy because the fires were not limited to Australia, they continued to roll over the western United States, they were in Europe and Siberia.”, quoted as saying to the NZ Herald
Pyne said the scale of the Black Summer fires made them different to blazes in previous years.
“While none of the individual fires in Australia or elsewhere were unprecedented, I think the scale was different because they came as a swarm.”
Earlier Pyne thought the Black Saturday fires in which 173 people died in Victoria in 2009, had set the limit for what a single fire could do. However, last year’s fire season expanded into months of continued burning.
“What made the fires different generally was the swarming effect over a large scale. They weren’t discrete outbreaks over two or three days, they continued.
“I think of that as a ‘rolling thunder effect’. When they are coming sequentially like that, it just keeps building.”
Pyne said California has also been a notable example of this phenomenon, with the state experiencing its fourth successive year of momentous fires.
Caption ; Players practise at Auckland’s ASB Tennis Centre in January under an orange sky, due to smoke coming from the Australian bushfires.
