| Late in 2018, the writer Daniel Duane started hearing about a nightmare scenario that, in perhaps a decade, could sweep the Sierra Nevada, that stretch of spectacular mountains between the Central Valley and the Great Basin. Dan had learned from researchers that during the drought of 2011 to 2016 in California, a breathtaking 150 million trees were killed in the largest mass die-off ever recorded in the United States. That, he was told, could create the conditions for mass fires bigger and more violent than anything the West had ever seen. About a year ago, we asked Dan to dig into the science of the wildfires in the West, and the potential of these coming firestorms, and write about it for WIRED. Along the way, he learned that big fires were already burning in terrifying new ways and were likely to get much worse. For the story, Dan talked to a well-known Forest Service scientist named Mark Finney. Years ago, Finney had made a most disturbing discovery: We've created the conditions for firestorms just like the ones intentionally set off by Allied bombers in Dresden during World War II. Then, just as Dan was writing a first draft about the frightening potential fires of the future, a dry lightning storm ignited fires all over California. The 2020 fire season quickly became the worst on record. One of those fires was called the Creek Fire. "Ignited on September 4 in an area with a lot of dead trees in the southern Sierra Nevada," Dan says, "the Creek fire behaved in ways nobody expected to see for years, with a huge pyrocumulonimbus generating its own lightning and fire tornadoes, and burning 115,000 acres with horrifying speed." Among the most peculiar of these behaviors, Dan writes, "was the fact that energy release across the Creek Fire's vast center remained just as hot and high as along its periphery. This classic hallmark of mass fire may well mean that the scary part—the future in which 150 million dead trees go up in flames—is already upon us." You can read Dan’s deep dive into the new physics of wildfires in the West, here. Dan will also join our Get WIRED podcast on Monday; subscribe on your platform of choice to be notified. Maria Streshinsky | Executive Editor |
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