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Here's the irony, it's because there's a lack of forest fires that there's been an increase of zombie fire's. You need regular brush fire's to help replenish the soil and remove build-up of dead and slowly decaying organic matter. This is a healthy amount of CO2 that's needed.
A little random but when you said sponsored by my heretige for a moment my brain said “ sci shows voice overs personal heritage was sponsoring the program
ALL that carbon released was captured from the atmosphere during the short life of the trees involved. Nonsense to suggest burned forests are increasing CO2 when all that wood releases ALL that CO2 regardless, post death....rotting or burning, unless it's in rare circumstance of turning into peat or "bio-char". Worth noting that methane only lasts about 15 yrs in our atmosphere which is normally trivial in terms of climate.
I wonder are there any species of pine that has a relationship with fire where this happens, many species of pine have some sort of relationship with fire and I could see a a type of pine being responsible for this. It might even be not a totally negative thing.
Zombie fires aren't limited to trees. In Canada's Yukon territory, near the town of Carmacks, there's an abandoned coal mine where the coal seams caught fire in 1978. It's been an extensive, uncontrolled underground zombie fire ever since. There are other examples from coal mines around the world. So even when we've finally given up burning coal for energy, we will still be burning coal.
There are some horrific ones in Russia (naturally lol) but the things that blow my mind are the natural fission reactors they've found in various places, where conditions have lead to uranium deposits slowly undergoing fission for millions of years.
I'm glad you're speaking about this topic. My 3rd zombie caught fire yesterday. Just when I've trained them to do gardening and cleaning,!🔥!... up in flames!
In Michigan we always recommend *against* burying campfires, especially in winter, because of this phenomenon. The ground on top freezes solid but underneath is a huge layer of decomposing leaves and pine, which create significant gaps that are perfect for smoldering fires.
This happened to us one year during our January thaw. We buried a campfire in our woods and realized it was burning in the roots of the trees close to the fire ring. We opened it back up and shoveled a lot of snow on top of it.
So instead of burying the fire before leaving camp maybe people should take the fires home. Maybe put on something nonflammable and put the fire and coals on top of the car. Excuse me, I have to go. My psychiatrist says I need to get back onto my meds
In Florida, the leaves and other organics in the sand can catch fire under a camp fire. You can put your fire out, without realizing there's a second fire under it. Water alone doesn't put it out, you have to dig it out, or otherwise pierce its roof to get water down to it.
when I'm done burning vegetation, I stir the embers to expose it to air and I let it finish burning outside, and sometimes I don't even throw dirt on it. I don't feel safe covering the smoldering fire.
I had seen brush piles (basically trees & dirt piled up from clearing forest for farmland) burn smolder for five years. They would flare up after you bust the piles open to sort the remaining wood from the dirt. I think the mice loved the heated piles during the winter. Sawdust piles at lumber mills can burn for years, they are like that underground coal fires that one town in the US sits on.
Same with compost. Here in Knoxville, TN, twice in the past 20 years, the municipal compost pile, next to an I-40 flyover, was made too high (about a two storey building hight), and it spontaneously ignited from within. Each time, it took a few days to wet it and dig it out, to where they could put it out. Because they were smouldering fires, they also were incompletely burning the wood chips, releasing CO, as well as CO², making the smoke extra lethal.
Please do a follow-up video telling HOW a fire is able to burn underground for MONTHS....like....where does the oxygen supply that is needed to sustain the fire come from? I suppose the roots of the plants provide something to burn.... Also, HOW are these fires actually extinguished? With chemicals? Water? Simply piling dirt over any "openings"? I'm agog to know! Thank you!
This is a science channel. You should be doing your own research regardless of presenter. I mean, Hank has literally posted "gotcha" facts where he calls people out at the end for not fact-checking something so absurd.
@@randysmith9715 Centrailia has a source of ignition- the coal/trash dump that has been burning for years. As long as there is a coal seam and trash dump it will circulate air through the vents it has made over the years from burning material and drying out the clay/topsoil. This "zombie fire" is nonsense. Unless they are saying it has a source to remain on fire between seasons, like a coal seam or trash field.
In Northern Minnesota, these fires are not rare. There are several every winter. When we go up to Lake of the Woods ice fishing, we can see smoke plumes in the snow. Up here, these fires are because we have a lot of peat in the soil in these areas and once the peat starts to burn, it doesn't stop until the peat is gone or something cuts off the oxygen, so they can actually burn for several years. Sometimes, they send bulldozers in to strip the burning peat, pile it up and let it burn out so the rest of the peat doesn't catch fire.
Never herd it Calle 'zombie fires' but have witnessed this several times for N Ont to N BC and NWT. Can be really strange in the middle of winter to see melted areas and even smoke coming from the frozen ground.
In many areas peat (in swamps/ex-swamps) can major fire "holder". Since layer of peat can be many meters deep, it can keep slowly burning for weeks/months.
Question: why not put devices in the forests that could detect rises in local temperatures? Sure it may be a bit pricey, but I'm sure it's more expensive to deal with the fires themselves.
Can already be done with satellites which have much larger range and can't be damaged by forest fires normally. So ultimately my answer is price and durability, there are better cheaper alternatives.
The fire hall has a drone with infrared We'll fly it around our local area after thunderstorms or if we get smoke calls An hour of drone time saves 6 people half a day of driving around on ATVs And...the money we made during our last campfire ban...paid for the drone By 10pm the ground is cool enough that those hot spots show up like a beacon And at $600.00 per adult sitting around the fire Smokey the Bear can make a lot of money
Yeah. This story is more scary than an actual zombie. I've not heard of this happening here in Australia, thankfully, fire seasons here are bad enough already!
When I think of forest fires, I think about how they are an essential part of the life cycle of most of the forests in North America. It makes me very glad that Florida does prescribed burns to keep our forests healthy.
@@-Devy- No, it is directly related. If western states had been doing as Natives used to do, doing prescribed, local burns, there wouldn't have been some of the massive fires which not doing so allowed to happen. Smaller fires would be less likely to cause deep, ground smouldering zombies.
@@-Devy- actually, it is quite related. The vast majority of the Western US are forests that require fire. The sequoia for example can't reproduce without it, and since Western states go to great lengths to prevent fires the sequoia is an engaged species. These zombie fires are started by massive burns that wouldn't happen if they were practicing responsible forest management, which includes regular prescribed burns.
We get something similar down here in Florida, muck fires burn swamp and grassland then seemingly go out but are still smoldering underground waiting for the next set of high winds and dry air then *POOF* the swamp is on fire again. We've had then last the entire summer rainy season just hiding underneath the sludge.
and here I thought swamps couldn't get any worse better stop before the next souls game has a poison swamp that's also constantly on fire ~~unless that's already happened~~
Now I didn't do fire service in wilderness fires but in rural firefighting we called that rekindling It's particularly bad on hayloff fires because hay will smolder for weeks Then I could reignute we call rekindle
The fire burns an area most of the burn is the undergrowth and duff(pine needles and leaves) the roots of trees sometimes come up to the surface. Where the ground fire and roots of big trees( takes a good sized root)intersect the roots start to burn. These can be easily missed by clean up crews. The roots then burn underground until they just smolder like paper, now it's all but impossible to find. 6- 9 months later it smolder back to the surface reignites the duff and we are back to the races. This was a known phenomenon but never proven, until it was the only possible source for a fire here in my home state of Oregon. I did several years, please thank your firefighters.
"When you think of forest fires, you might think of a fire season, or a time when fires are more likely to form and spread." Ah yes, the good ol' days, before fire season became year round. ~ California (and Australia) Seriously, these buried become a problem in northern California and Oregon, but at least they're not so big an area, so helicopters and ground crews can use thermal cameras/IR goggles to look for hot spots. I'm sorry but not surprised to hear it's a problem in Canada where there's so much more territory to cover. I hope satellites can help. I wonder if peat bogs and methane in permafrost can burn like the Centralia fire, not just roots, which is the main cause of these in the Pacific NW.
Methane doesn’t burn without O2 and with too little O2 the result is partial combustion of which produces CO (Carbon Monoxide). This gas molecule eventually gains another Oxygen atom becoming CO2, but that reaction with air can take a few months time. The result is a soup of obvious toxic gases that would be a problem for animals and plants. If these fires were real well humans could track them using the expected chemical signatures and on the ground bizarre animal behavior or any number of dead animals without injuries (from CO exposure) could signify a zombie fire is nearby under the surface. But when do people make sense and look for the expected these days?
@@demandedcargo3919 Moronic people have gotten bored of denying the earth is round and that covid is a threat and so now they're moving on to pretending that wild fires don't exist.
@@demandedcargo3919 Yeah, if the types and the durations of the fires they're talking about are even possible or really happening at all; given the landscape and conditions of the ground they're supposed to happen in permit. I'm not very familiar with Canada specifically but I'm no stranger to the type of land that plays host to vast forests. I'm not 100% convinced these people actually know that these fires were reignited by a slow smolder that remained active during the brutal wet winters they can see in those places.
@@VariantAEC Ever hear of coal seam fires? How about spontaneous combustion in compost or sawdust piles? All it takes is pressure and something that can burn, and these kinds of fires happen all the time, any time of year. If they aren't put out, they go on smouldering for months, until everything burnable is gone. That this happens isn't merely informed opinion, it's proven fact that it's happened. People just weren't thinking of old growth forests as essentially ancient compost, but that's exactly what their topsoil is. For just one example, look up "Knoxville, TN compost fire." We've had two in the past 20 years, which took days to dig open and put out.
A zombie fire happened in Oregon a couple years ago, during the really bad fire season of 2020. One resident of a town that got burnt badly returned after the fire on the surface was out and was able to record fire burning underground through and opening.
This is the first time I've seen somebody use "teragram" in a serious context. Normally we use tons when it comes to large masses. One ton is a million gram, or a megagram. A teragram is then a million tons.
I heard of similar events in New Zealand. Fires from the forest burnoffs burnjng tree roots, igniting peat in NZ swamps and starting fires years later as the peat smouldered underground.
I have a fireplace where I mostly use dry wood that makes a nice bank of coals, when we get downed limbs from D.fir and western red cedar in wind storms. The limbs get fed into the outdoor cooking fireplace as a way to clean them up... they stream a lot but when they get dry enough to catch fire, they can go up like throwing gas on a fire. They can slow smolder for quite some time. The moisture in and on the limbs will keep the limbs from flaring up... zombie fires maybe keeping the embers warm with those wet limbs, big bunches of tree limbs down on top of embers... could explain the delay... I know not to trust a limb fire until it's ash.... it's amazing now much volatile gases are in conifer needles.
In the Southern region of Lake Okeechobee there is a LOT of what would be peat in other places. During the dry season it can catch fire DEEP underground (3 to 10 feet) and be nearly impossible to put out. It can take until the wet season when the area can be underwater for a good bit of time to put it out. Of course the water has to flood the entire depth.
In my job we deal with these in Canada. We've had some of the same fires rear up again for YEARS. No one calls them zombie fires. They are just known as subterranean or underground fires. Fun fact: the oldest subterranean fire in Alberta is over 100 years and still burning!
This isn't about subterranean fire like Centralia's coal mine, it's a forest fire that reappears months later. Sure, during the winter you could call it an underground fire, but that masks its connection to wild fires. A simple web search turns up myriad sources (BBC, National Geographic, Washington Post) have all used the term in recent years.
For entire seasons? Damn thats absolutely mind boggling. I have seen fires lit up again after days of 0 activity, but i didnt expect them to last that long. (We collect all fallen branches, cut grass and other plant materials and burn them in a designated zone thats how i know btw)
hell, if that's got ya boggled, wait until you hear about what happens when these things hit coal seams. Centralia's been burning for decades now (since the 60's, iirc)
Perhaps infrared satellite imagery could be of some help during the off season. Ground crews could then locate these fires with ground based infrared and put them out, maybe even with shovels and snow.
And that's why we spend hours "cold trailing" a fire Gloves off....hands in the mud and dirt...feeling for hot spots My local fire department got called to a new lot under construction The guy who had cleared and leveled the building site had cut the trees then just bulldozed them under ground New owners came in and decided to light a campfire in the middle of their building site Fire went underground and sprang up down the bank We put that out...after hand shoveling a burning stump out from under a meter of dirt Two days later...another fire Put that one out A week later...back again to dig another big hole Set a guard on the site until we could get an excavator in Found 4 meter long logs half a meter wide criss-crossed and burning 2 meters down Could have burnt for years
Ok it will burn as long as there is combustible and an oxidation agent, i can see what could be used as combustible, but in no way there is enough oxygen difused in the ground to keep it burning for months. Keep in mind for example that moles dont go that deep, and they evolved to breath their own leftover oxygen.
Exactly it could make sense that this kind of fire could smolder at low temps under dry snow and maybe an inch or so of peet moss (where O2 could diffuse through those layers keeping the embers going), but not under several inches or feet of top soil. [Edit: Fixed errors in first sentence]
when i was younger we lit a fire in a drainage ditch and put it out, but the fire continued to smolder for a week living off the decomposing stuff in the ditch bed. in the end we managed to stop it all together. so river beds would be another area for this to happen.
Our dastardly wicked geology profs gave us a sample as a quiz during field camp. Somewhere in Idaho or Nevada, maybe Montana, doesn't matter, all have awesome rocks. Turns out the sample was a mish-mash of sandstone and limestone that had been underground and deformed by an ancient coal seam fire. They loved to see us in agony. I still have a small sample. I don't think any of us got it right.
This is normal. Climate change is real, but seriously, it's not always climate change. Wildfires are very complex. Climate and weather are very complex, and although related they're not the same thing.
More zombie fires can APPEAR to happen more often because we are now looking for them. Not necessarily because of climate change. Furthermore, the term “climate change” has become a vague catch all term for anything and everything that could be associated with gradual warming.
Thank you, I hate that climate change has become some sort of virtue signaling in the scientific community. Is it an issue, yes, but its not responsible for 90% of the things people say might be due to climate change. Everybody was up in arms about how climate change was causing a bunch of freakishly powerful hurricanes and how it was going to the apocalypse and every season from now on was going to be 10 cat 5s on average only to be put into a long dull of weak hurricane seasons. Meanwhile other issues that are climate change are pushed off to the side because the effects are subtle and not immediately catastrophic. We've gotten better at detection and prevention leading to more cases reported of known problems in the past. Everytime that happens instead of "this is a bigger issue than we thought, and we now know because of new methods and technology" its "might be climate change".
I am 100% certain this has to do with the fact that we obsessively put out wild fires. We have a disjointed view on the importance of letting wildfires burn.
What kind of conclusions can we draw from this concerning how the earth looked when it was much warmer? I know tropical type climate/forests covered more of the earth back in the day, but can we assume that the non tropical areas were all plains? Were there "boreal" forests back then?
Forests themselves were different because of the less evolved types of trees... off the top of my head I have no idea in what order trees evolved, like if coniferous or deciduous came first. I do remember that flowering plants came after the dinosaurs.
@@ChronoSquare I gave it some research and during cretaceous the rainforests consisted of conifers, cycads and ferns. The conifers of the time could even be deciduous! Apparently the rainforests even covered the poles, so I guess that answers my question!
@@98Zai Yep, that's what I thought. I'm not sure what we could call those ancient era bio regions other than: desert savannah/steppe maybe? some kind of temperate forest rain forest levels of swamps surely there was more nuance, but that kind of detail is very hard to discern from fossils and rocks.
My best guess is tree resin being more flamable and harder to put out. Which, since hot days draw out more sap and resin, would explain the increase in zombie fires as global warming increases. Interested in knowing why we don't use thermal imaging and methane sensors the day or two after a fire is put out to ensure it's completely out. The time could also be spent mixing the ash with the soil to make it more fertile for the next cycle. In this soil/ash mixing step, I'm sure more zombie fire could be found and put out sooner.
I remember once when I was a kid I was digging for charcoal in our burn pit to draw with, and burnt my hand on some embers deep under the ash that wouldn't be weird, except we hadn't lit the fire in over a year
Unpopular opinion: letting the fires burn all the potential fire load instead of putting them out prematurely. An experiment along this line: establish a circular fire break line around a designated area where Park personnel let that spot free-burn while also preventing spread. Compare that area versus areas where active suppression is carried out. Compare zombie fire #'s in each area for successive seasons.
I'm surprised peatlands weren't mentioned in this video as they are very essential to this topic and we need to talk about them more often. Peatlands are carbon sinks where decomposition happens very slowly, due to waterlogged conditions and the decay-resistant chemistry of Sphagnum moss, and carbon-rich peat accumulates. They are extremely extensive in the Boreal Forest but historically and still today they are drained and destroyed for purposes such as oil extraction, mining and converting the land for agriculture or development. When peatlands are drained and dry out, all the peat, which stores a lot more carbon than trees (people always talk about planting more trees to sequester carbon but we desperately need to stop degradation of peatlands) is very susceptible to burning (this is how fires can smoulder underground) and a lot of methane gets released, which as we know is a more potent GHG than CO2. Sphagnum moss, the ecosystem engineer of peatlands, has sequestered more carbon in the form of peat than any other plant genus: about 1/3 of all soil organic carbon is sequestered as peat because of this amazing plant. Because people generally don't know about these incredibly important ecosystems, fossil fuel companies have got away with destroying them for decades and as the climate warms, peatlands will continue to dry out and degrade in a positive feedback loop, releasing the 1/3 of all soil organic carbon into the atmosphere.
I mean, this is a matter of delineation. Every oxidation is unique, collectively called a fire, in perpetuity generally in relation to its consumption. But all of it is in sequence to chain reactions that never begin or end. If you're going to start defining zombie fires as the same fires, all fire is one fire.
When learning about volunteer firefighting they told us they "thin out" water with a soap-like chemical for forest fires so it seeps into the ground better.
wow that is a number i'd never thought i'd see. 3.5 teragrams. and i did the google math, and say thats equal to 3.85 million tons CO2, in case anyone was wondering...
Correlation is not causation. I suspect the hotter summers were also receiving less precipitation than cooler ones which would directly affect the fire.
Perhaps bacterial activity in thawing permafrost is another source for these zombie fires. Bacterial action can raise the temperature of compost to ignition levels. Permafrost contains the compost and the bacteria. Thaw the permafrost and raise the ambient temperature and you have the potential for spontaneous combustion.
Teragram is a bit weird unit to use. In my 30+ years of living with metric/SI i've never heard that used before. I think Megatonne is usually used for this scale?
Maybe rake the forests after all? I read that the fact that Americans actively prevented forest fires for decades meant that dead material on the ground built up over decades, which made forest fires, when they finally broke out, far worse that they would’ve been otherwise. But now global warming plays a major role as well, and forests made up of one kind of tree instead of a mix, like they used to be, also contribute to the severity of the outbreaks.
It seems under brush depth and terrain would play a bigger role than mentioned here. An underground fire will not burn if it's not vented properly to get oxygen. Organic layer depth, underlying porous or faulted rock, and nearby mountains and caves that funnel fresh air into the ground have to be a factor in this. Also methane seeps could also be involved.
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Here's the irony, it's because there's a lack of forest fires that there's been an increase of zombie fire's.
You need regular brush fire's to help replenish the soil and remove build-up of dead and slowly decaying organic matter. This is a healthy amount of CO2 that's needed.
A little random but when you said sponsored by my heretige for a moment my brain said “ sci shows voice overs personal heritage was sponsoring the program
ALL that carbon released was captured from the atmosphere during the short life of the trees involved.
Nonsense to suggest burned forests are increasing CO2 when all that wood releases ALL that CO2 regardless, post death....rotting or burning, unless it's in rare circumstance of turning into peat or "bio-char".
Worth noting that methane only lasts about 15 yrs in our atmosphere which is normally trivial in terms of climate.
I wonder are there any species of pine that has a relationship with fire where this happens, many species of pine have some sort of relationship with fire and I could see a a type of pine being responsible for this. It might even be not a totally negative thing.
Zombie fires aren't limited to trees. In Canada's Yukon territory, near the town of Carmacks, there's an abandoned coal mine where the coal seams caught fire in 1978. It's been an extensive, uncontrolled underground zombie fire ever since. There are other examples from coal mines around the world. So even when we've finally given up burning coal for energy, we will still be burning coal.
We should try dousing the burning mines with nuclear waste.
There is one here in Pennsylvania - Centrailia
how delightful.
Aren't those just normal coal seam fires? No one really mistakes them as having gone out and then re-stoking which seems to be the defining aspect.
There are some horrific ones in Russia (naturally lol) but the things that blow my mind are the natural fission reactors they've found in various places, where conditions have lead to uranium deposits slowly undergoing fission for millions of years.
I'm glad you're speaking about this topic. My 3rd zombie caught fire yesterday. Just when I've trained them to do gardening and cleaning,!🔥!... up in flames!
Something tells me you tried letting him out during the daytime. You know better.
I hate it when that happens🤬
@@misterflibble6601 They don't come with a F'king handbook!
( But yea, you're right 🥺)
One word sir asbestos
I heard adding plants helps with zombie problems
In Michigan we always recommend *against* burying campfires, especially in winter, because of this phenomenon.
The ground on top freezes solid but underneath is a huge layer of decomposing leaves and pine, which create significant gaps that are perfect for smoldering fires.
This happened to us one year during our January thaw. We buried a campfire in our woods and realized it was burning in the roots of the trees close to the fire ring. We opened it back up and shoveled a lot of snow on top of it.
So instead of burying the fire before leaving camp maybe people should take the fires home. Maybe put on something nonflammable and put the fire and coals on top of the car.
Excuse me, I have to go. My psychiatrist says I need to get back onto my meds
In Florida, the leaves and other organics in the sand can catch fire under a camp fire. You can put your fire out, without realizing there's a second fire under it. Water alone doesn't put it out, you have to dig it out, or otherwise pierce its roof to get water down to it.
when I'm done burning vegetation, I stir the embers to expose it to air and I let it finish burning outside, and sometimes I don't even throw dirt on it. I don't feel safe covering the smoldering fire.
@@michaeldeierhoi4096 Whatever you do, don't try... Puttin' out fire with... gaso-LEEEEEEEEEEN
I had seen brush piles (basically trees & dirt piled up from clearing forest for farmland) burn smolder for five years. They would flare up after you bust the piles open to sort the remaining wood from the dirt. I think the mice loved the heated piles during the winter.
Sawdust piles at lumber mills can burn for years, they are like that underground coal fires that one town in the US sits on.
Centralia PA
Same with compost. Here in Knoxville, TN, twice in the past 20 years, the municipal compost pile, next to an I-40 flyover, was made too high (about a two storey building hight), and it spontaneously ignited from within. Each time, it took a few days to wet it and dig it out, to where they could put it out. Because they were smouldering fires, they also were incompletely burning the wood chips, releasing CO, as well as CO², making the smoke extra lethal.
Please do a follow-up video telling HOW a fire is able to burn underground for MONTHS....like....where does the oxygen supply that is needed to sustain the fire come from? I suppose the roots of the plants provide something to burn.... Also, HOW are these fires actually extinguished? With chemicals? Water? Simply piling dirt over any "openings"? I'm agog to know! Thank you!
Sounds like someone has the roadmap already laid out, keep us posted
The Pennsylvania Centrailia fire has been burning since 1962...
Months? How about decades? *looks at Pennsylvania*
This is a science channel. You should be doing your own research regardless of presenter.
I mean, Hank has literally posted "gotcha" facts where he calls people out at the end for not fact-checking something so absurd.
@@randysmith9715 Centrailia has a source of ignition- the coal/trash dump that has been burning for years. As long as there is a coal seam and trash dump it will circulate air through the vents it has made over the years from burning material and drying out the clay/topsoil. This "zombie fire" is nonsense. Unless they are saying it has a source to remain on fire between seasons, like a coal seam or trash field.
Another one to add to Apocalypse Bingo.
How close are you to getting a bingo line? Or are you closer to winning a game of Blackout by now?
It's a wonder there is any life left on the planet heh heh heh
Yeah, basically the world is on fire.
In Northern Minnesota, these fires are not rare. There are several every winter. When we go up to Lake of the Woods ice fishing, we can see smoke plumes in the snow. Up here, these fires are because we have a lot of peat in the soil in these areas and once the peat starts to burn, it doesn't stop until the peat is gone or something cuts off the oxygen, so they can actually burn for several years. Sometimes, they send bulldozers in to strip the burning peat, pile it up and let it burn out so the rest of the peat doesn't catch fire.
My backyard in Milaca has deep holes were the peat burned out.
Used to be a farmer that burned every year.
Zombie fires? Now that’s something I haven’t heard of.
Exactly what I was thinking! Lol 😂 😂
This video contains 0% explanation of what zombie fires are.
We deal with these in my job, and I have NEVER heard them called zombie fires.
"Everything changed when the fire nation attacked."
Zombie fire nation*
You snapped
“Everything changed when the fire nation was attacked by zombies.” Bwahahahahahahaha!
Never herd it Calle 'zombie fires' but have witnessed this several times for N Ont to N BC and NWT. Can be really strange in the middle of winter to see melted areas and even smoke coming from the frozen ground.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've made it to the zombie fire level
Closest thing to real ones may be kuru or Chronic Wasting Disease
do we get exo suits?
@@roxassora2706 Is that the prion disease, similar to "mad cow?"
In many areas peat (in swamps/ex-swamps) can major fire "holder". Since layer of peat can be many meters deep, it can keep slowly burning for weeks/months.
Question: why not put devices in the forests that could detect rises in local temperatures? Sure it may be a bit pricey, but I'm sure it's more expensive to deal with the fires themselves.
Can already be done with satellites which have much larger range and can't be damaged by forest fires normally. So ultimately my answer is price and durability, there are better cheaper alternatives.
The fire hall has a drone with infrared
We'll fly it around our local area after thunderstorms or if we get smoke calls
An hour of drone time saves 6 people half a day of driving around on ATVs
And...the money we made during our last campfire ban...paid for the drone
By 10pm the ground is cool enough that those hot spots show up like a beacon
And at $600.00 per adult sitting around the fire
Smokey the Bear can make a lot of money
Yeah. This story is more scary than an actual zombie. I've not heard of this happening here in Australia, thankfully, fire seasons here are bad enough already!
Yup. Outrunning a fire is a lot trickier, based on any zombie movie I've seen (including World War Z lolz).
When I think of forest fires, I think about how they are an essential part of the life cycle of most of the forests in North America. It makes me very glad that Florida does prescribed burns to keep our forests healthy.
Just a bummer about all the muck fires.
Great and all, but completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
@@-Devy- No, it is directly related. If western states had been doing as Natives used to do, doing prescribed, local burns, there wouldn't have been some of the massive fires which not doing so allowed to happen. Smaller fires would be less likely to cause deep, ground smouldering zombies.
@@-Devy- actually, it is quite related.
The vast majority of the Western US are forests that require fire. The sequoia for example can't reproduce without it, and since Western states go to great lengths to prevent fires the sequoia is an engaged species.
These zombie fires are started by massive burns that wouldn't happen if they were practicing responsible forest management, which includes regular prescribed burns.
@@iwontliveinfear Want to talk natural? Humans don't belong. We are causing problems Nature wouldn't see otherwise.
We get something similar down here in Florida, muck fires burn swamp and grassland then seemingly go out but are still smoldering underground waiting for the next set of high winds and dry air then *POOF* the swamp is on fire again. We've had then last the entire summer rainy season just hiding underneath the sludge.
and here I thought swamps couldn't get any worse
better stop before the next souls game has a poison swamp that's also constantly on fire ~~unless that's already happened~~
Now I didn't do fire service in wilderness fires but in rural firefighting we called that rekindling It's particularly bad on hayloff fires because hay will smolder for weeks Then I could reignute we call rekindle
The fire burns an area most of the burn is the undergrowth and duff(pine needles and leaves) the roots of trees sometimes come up to the surface. Where the ground fire and roots of big trees( takes a good sized root)intersect the roots start to burn. These can be easily missed by clean up crews. The roots then burn underground until they just smolder like paper, now it's all but impossible to find. 6- 9 months later it smolder back to the surface reignites the duff and we are back to the races. This was a known phenomenon but never proven, until it was the only possible source for a fire here in my home state of Oregon. I did several years, please thank your firefighters.
Zombie Fire 🔥 would be a good metal band name.
🔥 💀 🔥
"When you think of forest fires, you might think of a fire season, or a time when fires are more likely to form and spread." Ah yes, the good ol' days, before fire season became year round. ~ California (and Australia)
Seriously, these buried become a problem in northern California and Oregon, but at least they're not so big an area, so helicopters and ground crews can use thermal cameras/IR goggles to look for hot spots. I'm sorry but not surprised to hear it's a problem in Canada where there's so much more territory to cover. I hope satellites can help.
I wonder if peat bogs and methane in permafrost can burn like the Centralia fire, not just roots, which is the main cause of these in the Pacific NW.
Methane doesn’t burn without O2 and with too little O2 the result is partial combustion of which produces CO (Carbon Monoxide). This gas molecule eventually gains another Oxygen atom becoming CO2, but that reaction with air can take a few months time.
The result is a soup of obvious toxic gases that would be a problem for animals and plants. If these fires were real well humans could track them using the expected chemical signatures and on the ground bizarre animal behavior or any number of dead animals without injuries (from CO exposure) could signify a zombie fire is nearby under the surface.
But when do people make sense and look for the expected these days?
@@VariantAEC If they were real? 🤔
@@demandedcargo3919 Moronic people have gotten bored of denying the earth is round and that covid is a threat and so now they're moving on to pretending that wild fires don't exist.
@@demandedcargo3919
Yeah, if the types and the durations of the fires they're talking about are even possible or really happening at all; given the landscape and conditions of the ground they're supposed to happen in permit.
I'm not very familiar with Canada specifically but I'm no stranger to the type of land that plays host to vast forests. I'm not 100% convinced these people actually know that these fires were reignited by a slow smolder that remained active during the brutal wet winters they can see in those places.
@@VariantAEC Ever hear of coal seam fires? How about spontaneous combustion in compost or sawdust piles? All it takes is pressure and something that can burn, and these kinds of fires happen all the time, any time of year. If they aren't put out, they go on smouldering for months, until everything burnable is gone. That this happens isn't merely informed opinion, it's proven fact that it's happened. People just weren't thinking of old growth forests as essentially ancient compost, but that's exactly what their topsoil is. For just one example, look up "Knoxville, TN compost fire." We've had two in the past 20 years, which took days to dig open and put out.
A zombie fire happened in Oregon a couple years ago, during the really bad fire season of 2020. One resident of a town that got burnt badly returned after the fire on the surface was out and was able to record fire burning underground through and opening.
This is the first time I've seen somebody use "teragram" in a serious context.
Normally we use tons when it comes to large masses. One ton is a million gram, or a megagram. A teragram is then a million tons.
Someone: fire can hibernate
Me: SAY WHAT
I have never heard of this phenomenon. Incredibly weird and interesting.
Three-headed zombie fires --- that's the next movie.
Fire's the only way to kill zombie trolls.
LOL I read the title as Zombie Flies Are on the Rise. 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I heard of similar events in New Zealand. Fires from the forest burnoffs burnjng tree roots, igniting peat in NZ swamps and starting fires years later as the peat smouldered underground.
Swamps are wet. Was the wetland damaged by human activity?
I have a fireplace where I mostly use dry wood that makes a nice bank of coals, when we get downed limbs from D.fir and western red cedar in wind storms. The limbs get fed into the outdoor cooking fireplace as a way to clean them up... they stream a lot but when they get dry enough to catch fire, they can go up like throwing gas on a fire. They can slow smolder for quite some time. The moisture in and on the limbs will keep the limbs from flaring up... zombie fires maybe keeping the embers warm with those wet limbs, big bunches of tree limbs down on top of embers... could explain the delay... I know not to trust a limb fire until it's ash.... it's amazing now much volatile gases are in conifer needles.
Yup. Lots of oils and resins. That's why dried out Christmas trees are a terrible fire hazard.
War in Europe, ancient stone in Japan that's holding a demon in cracks apart, aaaaand zombie fires. BINGO!
The creeping dread creeps faster... Zombie fires...
Reminds me of that ancient game SimEarth. In that game when global temperatures rose you had a ton more wild fires happen on your map.
The Unextinguished rises
This is insanely cool. Horrible but there nothing more metal than a zombie fire. Turns out Russia was just a zombie soviet union
In the Southern region of Lake Okeechobee there is a LOT of what would be peat in other places. During the dry season it can catch fire DEEP underground (3 to 10 feet) and be nearly impossible to put out. It can take until the wet season when the area can be underwater for a good bit of time to put it out. Of course the water has to flood the entire depth.
In my job we deal with these in Canada. We've had some of the same fires rear up again for YEARS. No one calls them zombie fires. They are just known as subterranean or underground fires.
Fun fact: the oldest subterranean fire in Alberta is over 100 years and still burning!
This isn't about subterranean fire like Centralia's coal mine, it's a forest fire that reappears months later. Sure, during the winter you could call it an underground fire, but that masks its connection to wild fires. A simple web search turns up myriad sources (BBC, National Geographic, Washington Post) have all used the term in recent years.
@@belg4mit yes, we deal primarily with forest fires. They get into the peat bogs and just keep coming back.
Now you can say that your job is to contain zombies.
They're prevalent in the Florida swampy area, as well
Zombies 🧟♀️ 🧟♂️ setting fires?? Crazy world. 🤪
For entire seasons? Damn thats absolutely mind boggling. I have seen fires lit up again after days of 0 activity, but i didnt expect them to last that long. (We collect all fallen branches, cut grass and other plant materials and burn them in a designated zone thats how i know btw)
hell, if that's got ya boggled, wait until you hear about what happens when these things hit coal seams. Centralia's been burning for decades now (since the 60's, iirc)
never realized how simliar the how its made theme song sounds to the SciShow theme song
I knew coal seams could burn underground, but I didn’t know regular soil stuff could burn underground 👀
Not regular soil. The soil has to be rich with dead and partly dampened plant rot. These fires cannot just happen anywhere.
@@VariantAEC yeah, but that’s like, not unreasonable for soil
Perhaps infrared satellite imagery could be of some help during the off season. Ground crews could then locate these fires with ground based infrared and put them out, maybe even with shovels and snow.
Very interesting, and good to know!
Thank you!
And that's why we spend hours "cold trailing" a fire
Gloves off....hands in the mud and dirt...feeling for hot spots
My local fire department got called to a new lot under construction
The guy who had cleared and leveled the building site had cut the trees then just bulldozed them under ground
New owners came in and decided to light a campfire in the middle of their building site
Fire went underground and sprang up down the bank
We put that out...after hand shoveling a burning stump out from under a meter of dirt
Two days later...another fire
Put that one out
A week later...back again to dig another big hole
Set a guard on the site until we could get an excavator in
Found 4 meter long logs half a meter wide criss-crossed and burning 2 meters down
Could have burnt for years
Ok it will burn as long as there is combustible and an oxidation agent, i can see what could be used as combustible, but in no way there is enough oxygen difused in the ground to keep it burning for months. Keep in mind for example that moles dont go that deep, and they evolved to breath their own leftover oxygen.
Exactly it could make sense that this kind of fire could smolder at low temps under dry snow and maybe an inch or so of peet moss (where O2 could diffuse through those layers keeping the embers going), but not under several inches or feet of top soil.
[Edit: Fixed errors in first sentence]
when i was younger we lit a fire in a drainage ditch and put it out, but the fire continued to smolder for a week living off the decomposing stuff in the ditch bed. in the end we managed to stop it all together. so river beds would be another area for this to happen.
Our dastardly wicked geology profs gave us a sample as a quiz during field camp. Somewhere in Idaho or Nevada, maybe Montana, doesn't matter, all have awesome rocks. Turns out the sample was a mish-mash of sandstone and limestone that had been underground and deformed by an ancient coal seam fire. They loved to see us in agony. I still have a small sample. I don't think any of us got it right.
I didn’t even know it was possible for a fire to burn underground or in the soil, would love to learn how that works
Not exactly burning, more like smouldering
Thank you
Should we make sure zombie fires are put out or should we leave them alone
Definitely put them out.
double-tap!
This is normal.
Climate change is real, but seriously, it's not always climate change. Wildfires are very complex. Climate and weather are very complex, and although related they're not the same thing.
Rhinos are nature’s firefighters.
More zombie fires can APPEAR to happen more often because we are now looking for them. Not necessarily because of climate change.
Furthermore, the term “climate change” has become a vague catch all term for anything and everything that could be associated with gradual warming.
Thank you, I hate that climate change has become some sort of virtue signaling in the scientific community.
Is it an issue, yes, but its not responsible for 90% of the things people say might be due to climate change. Everybody was up in arms about how climate change was causing a bunch of freakishly powerful hurricanes and how it was going to the apocalypse and every season from now on was going to be 10 cat 5s on average only to be put into a long dull of weak hurricane seasons. Meanwhile other issues that are climate change are pushed off to the side because the effects are subtle and not immediately catastrophic.
We've gotten better at detection and prevention leading to more cases reported of known problems in the past. Everytime that happens instead of "this is a bigger issue than we thought, and we now know because of new methods and technology" its "might be climate change".
@@michaelizquierdo6907
Exactly
Cool thanks
Wow! The more we know, the more we realize we don't know.
Fire under the snow? That's insane!
I am 100% certain this has to do with the fact that we obsessively put out wild fires. We have a disjointed view on the importance of letting wildfires burn.
Absolutely false. Stop trying to defend pollution
What kind of conclusions can we draw from this concerning how the earth looked when it was much warmer? I know tropical type climate/forests covered more of the earth back in the day, but can we assume that the non tropical areas were all plains? Were there "boreal" forests back then?
Forests themselves were different because of the less evolved types of trees... off the top of my head I have no idea in what order trees evolved, like if coniferous or deciduous came first. I do remember that flowering plants came after the dinosaurs.
@@ChronoSquare I gave it some research and during cretaceous the rainforests consisted of conifers, cycads and ferns. The conifers of the time could even be deciduous! Apparently the rainforests even covered the poles, so I guess that answers my question!
@@98Zai Yep, that's what I thought. I'm not sure what we could call those ancient era bio regions other than:
desert
savannah/steppe maybe?
some kind of temperate forest
rain forest
levels of swamps
surely there was more nuance, but that kind of detail is very hard to discern from fossils and rocks.
YIKES! This is amazing!
Aren't there subterranean fires which have been burning for years?
Imagine being in springtime walking through Alaska and a single tree just catches on fire. Call the cops and they just blame it on you hahaha
My best guess is tree resin being more flamable and harder to put out. Which, since hot days draw out more sap and resin, would explain the increase in zombie fires as global warming increases.
Interested in knowing why we don't use thermal imaging and methane sensors the day or two after a fire is put out to ensure it's completely out. The time could also be spent mixing the ash with the soil to make it more fertile for the next cycle. In this soil/ash mixing step, I'm sure more zombie fire could be found and put out sooner.
I remember once when I was a kid I was digging for charcoal in our burn pit to draw with, and burnt my hand on some embers deep under the ash
that wouldn't be weird, except we hadn't lit the fire in over a year
That's wild! 😯
Just love the title
OMGosh, I read the title of this as zombie FRIES! 😂✌🐩
Unpopular opinion: letting the fires burn all the potential fire load instead of putting them out prematurely.
An experiment along this line: establish a circular fire break line around a designated area where Park personnel let that spot free-burn while also preventing spread. Compare that area versus areas where active suppression is carried out. Compare zombie fire #'s in each area for successive seasons.
One doesn’t experience self transcendence, the illusion of self only dissipates🎈
I'm surprised peatlands weren't mentioned in this video as they are very essential to this topic and we need to talk about them more often. Peatlands are carbon sinks where decomposition happens very slowly, due to waterlogged conditions and the decay-resistant chemistry of Sphagnum moss, and carbon-rich peat accumulates. They are extremely extensive in the Boreal Forest but historically and still today they are drained and destroyed for purposes such as oil extraction, mining and converting the land for agriculture or development. When peatlands are drained and dry out, all the peat, which stores a lot more carbon than trees (people always talk about planting more trees to sequester carbon but we desperately need to stop degradation of peatlands) is very susceptible to burning (this is how fires can smoulder underground) and a lot of methane gets released, which as we know is a more potent GHG than CO2. Sphagnum moss, the ecosystem engineer of peatlands, has sequestered more carbon in the form of peat than any other plant genus: about 1/3 of all soil organic carbon is sequestered as peat because of this amazing plant. Because people generally don't know about these incredibly important ecosystems, fossil fuel companies have got away with destroying them for decades and as the climate warms, peatlands will continue to dry out and degrade in a positive feedback loop, releasing the 1/3 of all soil organic carbon into the atmosphere.
Boreal forests span the entire width of Canada, from the Yukon to Ontario to Labrador. Not just the north western territories
So even fire hibernates?
So it’s under snow but warmer weather is the trouble 😂
It would be great to see an episode about Peat Bog Fires as they are far scarier
I mean, this is a matter of delineation. Every oxidation is unique, collectively called a fire, in perpetuity generally in relation to its consumption. But all of it is in sequence to chain reactions that never begin or end. If you're going to start defining zombie fires as the same fires, all fire is one fire.
Yea, you got me with the title, this time! lol
Isn't there a video game about this? Yeah, it's called "Plants vs Zombies."
PvZ:Inferno-cide
Just when you think the world can’t get any weirder or more worrying, we now have to content with widespread Zombie Fires! FFS!
We have them here in Australia 🇦🇺
Fires that smoulder underground from lignotubers is my understanding
This would make an interesting addition to any and all zombie survival games haha
When learning about volunteer firefighting they told us they "thin out" water with a soap-like chemical for forest fires so it seeps into the ground better.
wow that is a number i'd never thought i'd see. 3.5 teragrams. and i did the google math, and say thats equal to 3.85 million tons CO2, in case anyone was wondering...
Correlation is not causation. I suspect the hotter summers were also receiving less precipitation than cooler ones which would directly affect the fire.
I reckon they must be in England more due to so much peat in the ground. We have Huge fires in Australia.
Great video 👍🏿
Can't believe I missed 'zombie fires' off of my 2022 bingo
Perhaps bacterial activity in thawing permafrost is another source for these zombie fires.
Bacterial action can raise the temperature of compost to ignition levels.
Permafrost contains the compost and the bacteria. Thaw the permafrost and raise the ambient temperature and you have the potential for spontaneous combustion.
You shouldn't set zombies on fire. It doesn't kill the zombie; it just gives the fire legs.
Earth: winter is coming
Wind: I'll just fly south
Fire: I'm going to hide.
Earth: where on Ezrth are you going to hide?
Fire: not on, in.
Earth:
Here's to making scenario SSP5-8.5 a reality. All hail the anthropocene epoch 🙌
And what about phenomena like the perpetually burning coal mine fire underground in Pennsylvania?
My zombie went up in flames last week. Now it's just a crawling pair of toes that are left.
Teragram is a bit weird unit to use. In my 30+ years of living with metric/SI i've never heard that used before. I think Megatonne is usually used for this scale?
That was my thought as well
Maybe rake the forests after all?
I read that the fact that Americans actively prevented forest fires for decades meant that dead material on the ground built up over decades, which made forest fires, when they finally broke out, far worse that they would’ve been otherwise. But now global warming plays a major role as well, and forests made up of one kind of tree instead of a mix, like they used to be, also contribute to the severity of the outbreaks.
It also makes sense that places that didn't historically burn might have higher instances of buried combustibles.
How can a fire that is smouldering *under snow* be put out ?
at about 1:17
Seems like a missed opportunity to call them phoenix fires since they rise form the ashes of other smoldering fires
AIGHT
who had Zombie Fires for Apocalypse Bingo?
Earth is consistently more insane than I expected it to be
It seems under brush depth and terrain would play a bigger role than mentioned here. An underground fire will not burn if it's not vented properly to get oxygen. Organic layer depth, underlying porous or faulted rock, and nearby mountains and caves that funnel fresh air into the ground have to be a factor in this. Also methane seeps could also be involved.
Melting Methane Clathrates are also contributing to zombie fires as well. :(