Narration:
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[Music] Narrator: On July 7th, 2019 the skies around Anchorage Alaska were thick with smoke.
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Across the Cook Inlet,
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the Swan Lake Fire had spread over nearly
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79,000 acres and was still growing.
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This was just one of over 400 fires that
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burned in Alaska so far in 2019.
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In the Arctic, fires can help rejuvenate
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ecosystems and make way for new growth.
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However, Arctic and boreal regions
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are warming at a faster rate than anywhere else
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on Earth, and hotter and drier summers are leading
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to accelerated fire cycles and more intense burns.
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Elizabeth Hoy: Fires in boreal forests are different
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than in other areas of the world, such as those in the western United States.
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One of the main differences is they have these really thick
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organic soils layers and these soil layers burn.
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And so you’re not just getting fires in the trees or in the canopy,
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you’re getting fires below the tree itself, like in that soil layer and
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that is really when you get a lot of these carbon emissions.
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Narrator: Wildfires release large amounts of particulate matter
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which is transported across and beyond the region following
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wind patterns. This means that a fire burning in the Arctic
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can impact people living thousands of miles away.
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Elizabeth Hoy: Because there are these thick stores of organic material
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in the soil, when they burn, they are
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releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which is then causing
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more warming. And that warming isn’t just going to happen in the
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Arctic, we’re going to see climate change happen throughout all of the world.
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Narrator: NASA is studying how a changing climate is
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contributing to more frequent and powerful Arctic fires,
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and what that means for ecosystems and our health.
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Elizabeth Hoy: ABoVE is the Arctic - Boreal Vulnerability Experiment. And
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it is a large-scale field campaign that NASA has
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designed to study many aspects of the ecosystem
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of the Arctic and boreal regions in Alaska and western Canada.
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In addition to field observations, NASA satellites
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give researchers the ability to track large-scale
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changes to the Arctic over a period of time.
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And it’s not uncommon for these Earth-observing satellites to be the first to detect wildfire,
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especially in the remote Arctic regions.
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Elizabeth Hoy: NASA does a really good job of putting
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all these different pieces together. That’s the benefit of having a large agency like NASA
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do this type of study.
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Narrator: On the ground and in the air, NASA is working to better understand
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the consequences of Arctic fires
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in one of the most rapidly changing regions on Earth.