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PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — Scientists studying an ice core extracted from Antarctica, which had preserved the planet’s climate history going back nearly 70,000 years, have discovered a link between wildfires and climate that could have implications for understanding climate change today and in the future.
Trapped in that ice were bubbles of methane. Previous studies had found spikes of the gas during periods of abrupt climate change throughout the last ice age that ended around 11,000 years ago, but Ben Riddell-Young, working on his doctoral thesis at Oregon State University, and his fellow scientists, also found these spikes in methane were evidence of increased wildfire activity on a global scale.
Riddell-Young, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Cooperative Institute for Research in environmental sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said during a recent interview that wildfires have a unique fingerprint that can be identified in the ice and measured.
“The methane that comes from wildfires has sort of this really distinct isotopic value,” he said. “Basically, if you have a big increase in wildfires, all of that distinct isotopic value is going to go into the atmosphere and change the whole atmospheric isotopic value, which is then what we measure in ice cores.”
Fire has been a feature of Earth’s history for eons and scientists have worked to understand its impact on the climate of yesterday with the goal of gaining insight into how it could impact the climate of today.
Riddell-Young’s research is the latest to help tease out that history. He was the lead author on a paper reporting the results published in the journal Nature at the beginning of this month.
For his research, he studied ice drilled from the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide about a decade ago. Ice cores drilled from that area are stored at the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. Scientists can then request samples, which is what Riddell-Young did.
His research centered around abrupt climate change or what he referred to as a “global reorganization of temperature and precipitation that leads to regional drought and fire.”
Ocean currents play an important role in regulating climate and temperatures around the planet and any change in them could potentially lead to abrupt climate change, significantly impacting life on Earth.
An important movement of currents is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have feared that with current global warming trends, the planet’s ice caps will melt, allowing fresh water to pour into the ocean, significantly slowing or putting an end to the present circulation of water, and wreaking havoc with current climate conditions on the planet.
Riddell-Young said scientists have known about abrupt climate change events in Earth’s history that have brought on drought, flooding and large changes in precipitation around the globe, but “what this study shows is that big increases in fires could be a significant factor in these events as well.”
“You have a whole region of the tropics that’s really wet for like hundreds of years, so you grow a whole forest instead of like a bunch of brush. And then during that abrupt climate change, you shift precipitation away and all of a sudden you have tons of fuel that dries out and you get this crazy pulse and fire,” he said.
Ray Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Riddell-Young’s paper was “innovative and important,” because it developed a new way of examining what caused changes in methane gas during the last ice age.
“We knew methane increased at those times, but we weren’t sure why. This paper suggests that an increase in wildfires was responsible, which is pretty interesting,” Bradley, who was not involved in Riddell-Young’s research, wrote in an email.
He said the research would likely prompt other scientists to use ice cores to further examine the link between wildfires and abrupt climate change.
Riddell-Young said it is important to look at past instances of abrupt climate change to learn what happened and then identify whether similar patterns are shaping up today.
“I think it just emphasizes the need to, you know, mitigate climate change and avoid these sorts of extreme events if we can,” he said.
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