Hungry for Clean Energy, Facebook Looks to a New Type of Geothermal

 A Fervo Energy geothermal site near Milford, Utah, last year. Meta has announced a similar project with a Sage Geosystems in Texas.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

 As electricity demand from data centers soars, Meta and Google are looking at a novel solution: harnessing clean heat far below Earth’s surface.

 

By Brad Plumer

Aug. 26, 2024

Big tech companies across the United States are struggling to find enough clean energy to power all the data centers they plan to build.

Now, some firms are betting on a novel solution: harvesting the heat deep beneath the Earth’s surface to create emissions-free electricity, using drilling techniques from the oil and gas fracking boom.

On Monday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced an agreement with a start-up called Sage Geosystems to develop up to 150 megawatts of an advanced type of geothermal energy that would help power the tech giant’s expanding array of data centers. That is roughly enough electricity to power 70,000 homes.

Sage will use fracking techniques similar to those that have helped extract vast amounts of oil and gas from shale rock. But rather than drill for fossil fuels, Sage plans to create fractures thousands of feet beneath the surface and pump water into them. The heat and pressure underground should heat the water to the point where it can be used to generate electricity in a turbine, all without the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.

 

“It’s basically the same fracking technology,” said Cindy Taff, an oil industry veteran who worked at Shell for 36 years before becoming Sage’s chief executive. “The difference is that we’re going after clean heat instead of hydrocarbons” such as oil and gas.

Sage has already drilled a test well in South Texas to demonstrate its approach. The startup now aims to build its first large-scale power plant at a yet-to-be-determined location east of the Rocky Mountains, with the first phase coming online by 2027.

The deal is the latest sign of growing excitement for new types of geothermal power that could provide enormous amounts of emissions-free electricity around the clock and complement more variable sources like wind and solar power.

Google has partnered with Fervo Energy, a prominent geothermal start-up, to build a 5-megawatt pilot plant in Nevada that has already begun supplying power to the grid. The two companies recently reached a deal to supply much more geothermal power in the years ahead to Google’s data centers.

Fervo is also building a 400-megawatt plant in Utah that will sell electricity to utilities in Southern California and is expected to come online starting in 2026.

 Tech firms are facing an urgent need for more electricity, as growing interest in artificial intelligence has triggered a data center boom. By one estimate, data centers could consume 9 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030, up from 4 percent today.

 

Data centers typically need power 24 hours a day, which wind turbines and solar panels alone can’t provide. At the same time, many technology companies have promised to reduce their planet-warming emissions and face pressure not to rely on fossil fuels like coal or gas. So they are exploring technologies that can run around the clock, like nuclear power or enhanced geothermal.

“We’re going to need every tool in the arsenal,” said Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, a nonprofit organization. “In the near term, enhanced geothermal might play a relatively small role, but I feel very optimistic about where the technology is going.”

Geothermal power has been around for decades. But traditionally, geothermal plants were limited to places where companies could easily tap underground hot water reservoirs close to the surface. Only a few locations have the right geology for this, such as parts of California or Iceland, which is why geothermal currently provides just 0.4 percent of America’s electricity.

 

But everywhere on Earth contains enormous amounts of underground heat if one can drill down far enough, and dozens of startups are exploring techniques to unlock that heat in new locations. Although it can be expensive to drill thousands of feet deep into hot, dry rock, those costs are falling as companies gain experience. In February, Fervo said it had already reduced drilling times by up to 70 percent in just one year.

“We’re already way ahead of where people expected us to be, and we’re expecting more dramatic cost reductions in the future,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo’s chief executive.

The Energy Department estimates that geothermal could provide 90,000 megawatts of U.S. electric capacity by 2050 if technologies keep improving, a twentyfold increase from today.

“Geothermal has such enormous potential,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in March.

Still, next-generation geothermal gets significantly less federal funding than other technologies like hydrogen fuels or nuclear power, in part because it has only recently emerged as a promising energy source. That means support from climate-conscious tech companies could be crucial as geothermal start-ups navigate the risks of getting early projects built.

Urvi Parekh, head of renewable energy at Meta, said the company wanted to signal ahead of time that it intended to buy electricity from Sage so that the start-up could raise funding and begin lining up equipment. “There’s a tremendous value to us making that commitment today,” Ms. Parekh said. “That way they can take the steps necessary to get that project that we want to see on the electricity grids.”

 

Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming. More about Brad Plumer

Onda de calor pode trazer novas queimadas, diz presidente do Ibama

 

Presidente do órgão, Rodrigo Agostinho, afirma que foco atual está no sul da Amazônia e que aumento da temperatura pode agravar situação

Da CNN

27/08/2024 às 18:04 

 Em entrevista à CNN, o presidente do Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (Ibama), Rodrigo Agostinho, alertou sobre o risco iminente de novas queimadas no país devido a uma prevista onda de calor.

 

Segundo Agostinho, a situação atual dos focos de incêndio está sob controle em algumas regiões, mas o cenário pode se agravar nos próximos dias.

De acordo com o dirigente, a maior concentração de focos de calor atualmente se encontra na área conhecida como Arco do Desmatamento, que abrange o sul da Amazônia.

Ele também mencionou a presença de focos na região do Cerrado, especialmente no Mato Grosso.

Previsão meteorológica e seus impactos

Agostinho revelou que as informações meteorológicas indicam que a massa de ar frio que atingiu o Sul do país está perdendo força. Consequentemente, é esperada uma nova onda de calor nos próximos dias.

 Esta mudança climática pode ter efeitos contraditórios: a melhora na qualidade do ar das cidades afetadas pela fumaça com a subida do ar quente; o aumento do risco de incêndios florestais.

 

Medidas preventivas e de combate

O Ibama está monitorando de perto a situação meteorológica para orientar suas ações. Agostinho informou que a instituição conta com um número significativo de recursos para combater possíveis incêndios:

“Estamos com um número muito grande de aeronaves, embarcações, brigadistas e estamos trabalhando em articulação, principalmente com os governos estaduais”, afirmou o presidente do Ibama.

A situação requer atenção contínua e ação coordenada entre as diferentes esferas governamentais para prevenir e combater os incêndios florestais que possam surgir com a chegada da nova onda de calor.

Os textos gerados por inteligência artificial na CNN Brasil são feitos com base nos cortes de vídeos dos jornais de sua programação. Todas as informações são apuradas e checadas por jornalistas. O texto final também passa pela revisão da equipe de jornalismo da CNN

Brazil - Governo de SP decreta situação de emergência em 45 cidades por causa de incêndios florestais no estado; veja lista

 

Foram 2,3 mil queimadas no estado entre quinta (22) e sexta-feira (23), o maior número do país, à frente de estados na Amazônia Legal, que também enfrentam temporada de queimadas. Gabinete de crise do governo lista 34 cidades em alerta e 24 com focos ativos de incêndio.

 

Cidades de diversas regiões amanheceram com fumaça e fuligem em decorrência de queimadas. Após recorde nacional de focos de incêndios, estado registrou mais 305 novos incidentes, de acordo com o Inpe.

Por g1 Ribeirão Preto e Franca

 

O governo do estado de São Paulo declarou situação de emergência em 45 cidades devido à quantidade devastadora de incêndios florestais registradas nos últimos dias. O estado bateu recorde nacional na sexta-feira (23) com mais de 2,3 mil focos de incêndio. Mais 305 incidentes foram registrados neste sábado (24), de acordo com o Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe).

O decreto vale por 180 dias e indica que os focos de incêndio "resultaram em graves danos humanos, materiais e ambientais, além de significativos prejuízos econômicos e sociais" nas cidades incluídas no documento (veja a lista completa abaixo).

O decreto ocorre logo após o governo anunciar um gabinete de crise. Mais cedo, o governador Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicanos) anunciou uma força-tarefa com aviões das Forças Armadas para conter as chamas. A ação deve ser concentrada na cidade de Ribeirão Preto, que enfrenta o quadro mais grave. 

 Segundo a legislação, a situação de emergência ocorre por situações anormais ou desastres que causam danos e prejuízos e implicam o comprometimento da capacidade de resposta do poder público. 

 A região de Ribeirão Preto (SP) amanheceu tomada por uma névoa de poluição, que foi se intensificando ao longo do dia. Durante a tarde, o dia virou noite, com um forte cheiro de fumaça e ventos que assustaram moradores. 

 

Em Ribeirão Preto, as atividades ao ar livre foram suspensas pela prefeitura e jogos de futebol dos times da cidade, Comercial e Botafogo-SP, foram adiados. Além disso, foram relatados picos de energia elétrica em diferentes pontos e problemas no fornecimento de água devido ao desligamento de pelo menos 23 poços e atendimentos na rede de saúde 60% acima da média.

Desde quinta-feira (22) o problema causou fechamento de rodovias, mortes, acidentes e estragos para produtores rurais de diferentes regiões.

Confira lista de cidades em situação de emergência

1. Águas da Prata

2. Alumínio

3. Amparo

4. Bananal

5. Bebedouro

6. Bernardino de Campos

7. Boa Esperança do Sul

8. Brodowski

9. Coronl Macedo

10. Dourado

11. Iacanga

12. Ibiting

13. Itápoli

14. Itirapina

15. Jaú

16. Lucélia

17. Luís Antônio

18. Monte Alegre do Sul

19. Monte Azul Paulista

20. Morro Agudo

21. Nova Granada

22. Pedregulho

23. Piracicaba

24. Pirapora do Bom Jesus

25. Pitangueiras

26. Poloni

27. Pompeia

28. Pontal

29. Presidente Epitácio

30. Ribeirão Preto

31. Rosana

32. Sabino

33. Salmourão

34. Santo Antônio da Alegria

35. Santo Antônio do Aracanguá

36. São José do Rio Preto

37. São Luís do Paraitinga

38. São Simão

39. Sertãozinho 

 40. Tabatinga

41. Taquarituba

42. Torrinha

43. Ubarana

44. Urupês

45. Valentim Gentil 

 

No topo da lista do Inpe aparecem as cidades de Pitangueiras (SP), Altinópolis (SP) e Sertãozinho (SP), que juntas somam 203 focos. Pontes Geral (SP), Urupês (SP), Salmourão (SP) e Pontal (SP) aparecem na sequência com mais 165 casos. Ribeirão Preto (SP) consta entre as 20 cidades com mais ocorrências do estado, com 32. 

 Incêndios, mortes e medo

Desde quinta-feira (22), uma série de incêndios em vegetação no interior de São Paulo tem causado transtornos em diversas cidades.

O tempo seco e os ventos de pré-frontais favorecem a propagação de incêndios que atingem todo o estado de São Paulo e o fenômeno é conhecido como 'plumas de fumaça', ou seja, grandes nuvens de fumaça provocadas por queimadas capazes até de encobrir o sol.

Em Urupês, dois funcionários de uma usina morreram enquanto tentavam combater um incêndio. As vítimas, de 30 e 48 anos, são moradores de Irapuã e José Bonifácio (SP), respectivamente. 

 

Um engavetamento envolvendo sete veículos deixou dois feridos na quinta-feira (22) na Rodovia Brigadeiro Faria Lima, em Pitangueiras. Além disso, houve interdições totais em diferentes rodovias.

Já em Piracicaba (SP), um avião precisou ser acionado para combater as chamas de um incêndio que já dura seis dias -- desde o domingo (19). O local afetado é uma área próxima da Estação Ecológica de Ibicatu. A umidade do ar na região chegou a 15% e há alerta vermelho para uma nova onda de calor. 

 Em Iracemápolis (SP), a cortina de fumaça proveniente de um incêndio em uma mata às margens da Rodovia Dr. João Mendes da Silva Junior invadiu a pista. Essa é a terceira ocorrência de queimada na área da usina em dois dias. 

 

O governo também informou que incêndios florestais podem atingir grandes áreas de vegetação natural e, por conta das rajadas de vento, o fogo pode se alastrar rapidamente.

O gabinete confirmou ainda uma ação de monitoramento e controle que conta com técnicos da Defesa Civil do Estado e das secretarias da Segurança Pública (SSP), Agricultura e Abastecimento e de Meio Ambiente, Infraestrutura e Logística (Semil).

Também comunicou que mais de 7,3 mil entre profissionais e voluntários estão mobilizados no combate às chamas e na orientação da população. 

 

How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse.

By Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul

Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.

We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.

For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point.

Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back.

When corals go ghostly white, they aren’t necessarily dead, and their reefs aren’t necessarily gone forever. Too much heat in the water causes the corals to expel the symbiotic algae living inside their tissues. If conditions improve, they can survive this bleaching. In time, the reefs can bounce back. As the world gets warmer, though, occasional bleaching is becoming regular bleaching. Mild bleaching is becoming severe bleaching.

Scientists’ latest predictions are grim. Even if humanity moves swiftly to rein in global warming, 70 percent to 90 percent of today’s reef-building corals could die in the coming decades. If we don’t, the toll could be 99 percent or more. A reef can look healthy right up until its corals start bleaching and dying. Eventually, it is a graveyard.

This doesn’t necessarily mean reef-building corals will go extinct. Hardier ones might endure in pockets. But the vibrant ecosystems these creatures support will be unrecognizable. There is no bouncing back anytime soon, not in the places corals live today, not at any scale.

When it might happen: It could already be underway.

In the ground beneath the world’s cold places, the accumulated remains of long-dead plants and animals contain a lot of carbon, roughly twice the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere. As heat, wildfires and rains thaw and destabilize the frozen ground, microbes get to work, converting this carbon into carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gasses worsen the heat and the fire and the rain, which intensifies the thawing.

Like many of these vast, self-propelling shifts in our climate, permafrost thaw is complicated to predict. Large areas have already come unfrozen, in Western Canada, in Alaska, in Siberia. But how quickly the rest of it might defrost, how much that would add to global warming, how much of the carbon might stay trapped down there because the thawing causes new vegetation to sprout up on top of it — all of that is tricky to pin down.

“Because these things are very uncertain, there’s a bias toward not talking about it or dismissing the possibility, even,” said Tapio Schneider, a climate scientist at the California Institute of Technology. “That, I think, is a mistake,” he said. “It’s still important to explore the risks, even if the probability of occurrence in the near future is relatively small.”

When it might happen: The timing will vary place to place. The effects on global warming could accumulate over a century or more.

The colossal ice sheets that blanket Earth’s poles aren’t melting the way an ice cube melts. Because of their sheer bigness and geometric complexity, a host of factors shapes how quickly the ice sheds its bulk and adds to the rising oceans. Among these factors, scientists are particularly concerned about ones that could start feeding on themselves, causing the melting to accelerate in a way that would be very hard to stop.

In Greenland, the issue is elevation. As the surface of the ice loses height, more of it sits at a balmier altitude, exposed to warmer air. That makes it melt even faster.

Scientists know, from geological evidence, that large parts of Greenland have been ice-free before. They also know that the consequences of another great melt could reverberate worldwide, affecting ocean currents and rainfall down into the tropics and beyond.

When it might happen: Irreversible melting could begin this century and unfold over hundreds, even thousands, of years.

 

 At the other end of the world from Greenland, the ice of western Antarctica is threatened less by warm air than by warm water.

Many West Antarctic glaciers flow out to sea, which means their undersides are exposed to constant bathing by ocean currents. As the water warms, these floating ice shelves melt and weaken from below, particularly where they sit on the seafloor. Like a dancer holding a difficult pose, the shelf starts to lose its footing. With less floating ice to hold it back, more ice from the continent’s interior would slide into the ocean. Eventually, the ice at the water’s edge might fail to support its own weight and crack into pieces.

The West Antarctic ice sheet has probably collapsed before, in Earth’s deep past. How close today’s ice is to suffering the same fate is something scientists are still trying to figure out.

“If you think about the future of the world’s coastlines, 50 percent of the story is going to be the melt of Antarctica,” said David Holland, a New York University scientist who studies polar regions. And yet, he said, when it comes to understanding how the continent’s ice might break apart, “we are at Day Zero.”

When it might happen: As in Greenland, the ice sheet could begin to recede irreversibly in this century.

Around 15,000 years ago, the Sahara started turning green. It began when small shifts in Earth’s orbit caused North Africa to be sunnier each summer. This warmed the land, causing the winds to shift and draw in more moist air from over the Atlantic. The moisture fell as monsoon rain, which fed grasses and filled lakes, some as large as the Caspian Sea. Animals flourished: elephants, giraffes, ancestral cattle. So did humans, as engravings and rock paintings from the era attest. Only about 5,000 years ago did the region transform back into the harsh desert we know today.

Scientists now understand that the Sahara has flipped several times over the ages between arid and humid, between barren and temperate. They are less sure about how, and whether, the West African monsoon might shift or intensify in response to today’s warming. (Despite its name, the region’s monsoon unleashes rain over parts of East Africa as well.)

Whatever happens will matter hugely to an area of the world where many people’s nutrition and livelihoods depend on the skies.

When it might happen: Hard to predict.

  

Besides being home to hundreds of Indigenous communities, millions of animal and plant species and 400 billion trees; besides containing untold numbers of other living things that have yet to be discovered, named and described; and besides storing an abundance of carbon that might otherwise be warming the planet, the Amazon rainforest plays another big role. It is a living, churning, breathing engine of weather.

The combined exhalations of all those trees give rise to clouds fat with moisture. When this moisture falls, it helps keep the region lush and forested.

Now, though, ranchers and farmers are clearing the trees, and global warming is worsening wildfires and droughts. Scientists worry that once too much more of the forest is gone, this rain machine could break down, causing the rest of the forest to wither and degrade into grassy savanna.

By 2050, as much as half of today’s Amazon forest could be at risk of undergoing this kind of degradation, researchers recently estimated.

When it might happen: Will depend on how rapidly people clear, or protect, the remaining forest.

Sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean, from the western coasts of Africa, round through the Caribbean and up toward Europe before heading down again, a colossal loop of seawater sets temperatures and rainfall for a big part of the globe. Saltier, denser water sinks to the ocean depths while fresher, lighter water rises, keeping this conveyor belt turning.

Now, though, Greenland’s melting ice is upsetting this balance by infusing the North Atlantic with immense new flows of freshwater. Scientists fear that if the motor slows too much, it could stall, upending weather patterns for billions of people in Europe and the tropics.

Scientists have already seen signs of a slowdown in these currents, which go by an unwieldy name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. The hard part is predicting when a slowdown might become a shutdown. At the moment, our data and records are just too limited, said Niklas Boers, a climate scientist at the Technical University of Munich and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Already, though, we know enough to be sure about one thing, Dr. Boers said. “With every gram of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, we are increasing the likelihood of tipping events,” he said. “The longer we wait” to slash emissions, he said, “the farther we go into dangerous territory.”

When it might happen: Very hard to predict.

Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced nearly a decade’s worth of blaze emissions

 

 

The health impacts from last year’s fires will also continue to be felt for decades. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

 

 

 Fires made at least three times more likely by climate crisis and emitted about 2bn tonnes of CO2, data reveals.

 

Canada’s “record-shattering” wildfires last year produced nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions in one season as would be expected over a decade of fires in normal circumstances, data has shown.

The fires, in Canada’s “wildest season ever”, were made at least three times more likely by the climate crisis, and produced about 2bn tonnes of CO₂, about a quarter of the total global emissions from wildfires last year, according to data in the State of Wildfires report, published on Wednesday.

The health impacts from last year’s fires will also continue to be felt for decades.

Carbon dioxide from wildfires is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, reaching about 8.6bn tonnes last year, considerably more than the 4.8bn annual emissions of the US from all sources. However, the net impact of fires is likely to be reduced by the regrowth of vegetation taking up carbon from the atmosphere.

Matthew Jones, a research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, and lead author of the report, warned that damage from intensifying wildfires would continue to increase unless the world succeeded in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. Wildfires not only kill people, wildlife and livestock, and devastate trees and other landscapes, but can cause widespread and dangerous air pollution.

They are also an increasingly important contributor to the climate crisis, through their greenhouse gas emissions and destruction of carbon stored in vegetation and soil.

“These fires are something we should all be concerned about,” he said. “The full effects of last year’s fires will not be seen for a long time.”

Huge wildfires sweep across British Columbia 

 Canada’s fires, with a burned area that was six times greater than the average year, were some of last year’s worst. Brazil’s Amazonas state also had record highs, owing to a severe drought, while fires in Hawaii and Texas killed more than 100 people. The biggest single fire ever recorded in the EU burned 900 sq km of Greece.

However, lower than usual levels of burning in African savannah meant the greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires last year were only 16% above average – if savannahs had burned at their usual rate, rather than experiencing such relative calm, last year would have set a new record.

Separate data from the World Resources Institute showed that in 2023 nearly 12m hectares were burned by forest fires, an area roughly the size of Nicaragua, which was about a quarter more than the previous record in 2016. Between 2001 and 2023, the area burned has increased by about 5.4% a year, with the result that forest fires now result in nearly 6m more hectares of tree cover loss a year than they did in 2001 – an area roughly the size of Croatia.

Fires require not just high temperatures, but also an abundance of dry vegetation, and some form of ignition – either human or natural – to start and to continue burning fiercely. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions must be the biggest priority to prevent more wildfires in future, the authors said, but better land management and early warning systems could also help.

Banning people from setting fires, creating fire breaks and boundaries, and managing agricultural and forested areas in such a way as to reduce the amount of dry brush that provides fuel for fires, are also important. Providing masks and ventilation can also reduce the air pollution impact.

Early warning systems can be limited, however – in many hot areas there is a high likelihood of fire for most of the summer season.

“Wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense as the climate warms, and both society and the environment are suffering from the consequences,” said Jones.

Although wildfires occur naturally in many of the world’s hot regions, the effects of the climate crisis on their frequency and severity are now clear, according to the report. Human-driven changes to the climate made fires three times more likely in Canada, 20 times more likely in western Amazonia, and twice as likely in Greece.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to mount, bigger fires can be expected. The researchers found that a Canadian born today would be more likely than not to experience another fire of similar magnitude to last year’s inferno within their lifetime, compared with a one in 10 chance of seeing such a fire for someone born in the 1940s.

Even wetlands and moist rainforests are now at high risk of fire, as unprecedented drought has taken hold. Brazil’s Pantanal region was devastated in June by record-breaking fires, which laid waste to globally important wildlife habitats.

Although regrowing forests can absorb carbon dioxide from the air as they develop – creating a “delayed carbon sink” – the shifts to more frequent fires are creating a worrying trend, where vegetation has less chance to recover, Jones added. This is making fires an increasing source of carbon in the atmosphere.

“The real problem begins when you have a shift in the fire regime away from its natural state and towards more frequent and severe burning. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’re seeing in forests, and it’s resulting in an imbalance – immediate emissions from forest fires this decade are increasingly outweighing the delayed sinks from fires in previous decades,” he said.

The State of Wildfires report 2023-24, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, was led by the University of East Anglia, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and the Met Office, with the help of a broad network of researchers and institutions around the world. Scientists used global satellite observations, computer models and research from regional experts to compile the data.

Parts of Canada’s Boreal Forest Are Burning Faster Than They Can Regrow

The delicate balance of one of the planet’s largest natural systems for storing carbon depends on the humble black spruce tree.

 Manuela Andreoni, a climate reporter, and Bryan Denton, a photographer, traveled with researchers to Canada’s boreal forests in the Northwest Territories

 

The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks standing tall above the gray landscape as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground.

The spruce seedlings were gone.

Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. It was a scorching late spring morning, and she and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier.

“Wow, it’s kind of crazy in here,” Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape. She had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire.

The boreal forests are the largest forests in the world, and in Western Canada they evolved to burn once every century or so. But this patch of forest had just burned for the second time in a decade. As a result, many trees would struggle here, she explained. The slow-growing black spruce didn’t stand a chance.

Where Canada’s Monster Fires Burned — and Re-Burned

 

More frequent, bigger wildfires, fueled by climate change, are a formidable challenge to the black spruce, a species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years. Their gradual decline, now accelerated by last year’s fire season, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the new age of wildfires aren’t just overwhelming people with the smoke and destructive blazes now raging across North America — they are overwhelming nature, too.

The dwindling number of black spruce trees, scientists say, is deeply transforming an ecosystem that is one of Earth’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide, a crucial tool to keep the atmosphere from warming even more than it already has.

Last year’s fires engulfed a stretch of forest the size of the Netherlands for at least the second time in 50 years, according to an analysis by Natural Resources Canada, a federal government department.

What was troubling, Dr. Baltzer noted, is that fire isn’t supposed to make life harder for the black spruce tree. Quite the opposite.

Jennifer Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, in a spruce stand that burned last year outside Behchoko, Northwest Territories.

 

Black spruce cones, which open and release their seeds with the help of fire.

 

 

Black spruce forests didn’t just evolve alongside fire, they depend on it. The tree is a natural bonfire of sorts. Its branches are covered with flammable resin that fuels the flames of forest fires right up to the tree’s crown. Fires help melt the waxy coating of black spruce cones until the trees release seeds onto the soil where seedlings can grow.

But if they burn too often, there aren’t enough viable seeds to reproduce. Burn too hot, and the seeds are killed. Burn too deeply, and the organic layer of soil where black spruce trees thrive, and which takes decades to accumulate, is gone.

In recent years, the black spruce failed to regenerate after fire in a fifth of the hundreds of sites Dr. Baltzer and other researchers monitored in North America’s boreal forests. And that was before the fire season of 2023.

The black spruce’s struggles are a gradual break to an ancient natural cycle, one that releases planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere as old trees burn, and then gradually returns that carbon to the land, in the form of new trees and new soil. Any imbalance in this tug of war between life and death can threaten the boreal forests’ ability to store heat-trapping carbon.

Where Black Spruce Dominates Canada’s Boreal Forest

Last summer, temperatures in Canada were more than 2.2 degrees Celsius, or 4 degrees Fahrenheit, above the historical average of the past few decades. Around the Northwest Territories, it was even hotter. The heat is largely why fires as severe as last year’s happened many years before scientists anticipated. Most climate projections didn’t expect these kinds of fires until later in the century, a new preprint study found.

“The entire bloody country was hot and dry at the same time,” said Marc-André Parisien, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service and an author of the study. “If you would have told me that a few years ago, I’d be like no, that doesn’t really make sense.”

Forest fires are burning more than twice as much tree cover as they did 20 years ago. They have also become more intense and frequent, especially in the boreal forests, according to a recent study. Increasing temperatures, fueled by the burning of oil, gas and coal, are the biggest culprit.

 A wildfire burning south of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, last August. Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

 

In the Northwest Territories, as Dr. Baltzer drove through the burned forests on her way to visit another site, she recalled the moment the scope of the 2023 tragedy became clear. She was reading headlines about the immense blazes when it hit her that the planet had briefly reached the temperature at which countries had agreed in the Paris Agreement to cap warming: 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

Temperatures would need to be at that level for several years for the global target to be breached. But for a scientist who had spent much of her career tracking fire, the consequences of a planet that was warming this quickly were clear.

If the world continued on this trajectory, it didn’t matter how hard she or anyone worked to protect the boreal forests.

“Everything will burn,” she said.

‘The trees melted’

A single burned tree near Kakisa, Northwest Territories, an area that has burned twice in the last 10 years.

The scraggly, skinny black spruce trees may not be much to look at. But what lies in the soils below them is one of nature’s biggest gifts to living things, a vault of the forest’s past lives, in icy slow decomposition, that stores immense amounts of planet-warming carbon.

The researchers were on their way to document another area that had burned in 2023 when they walked into an ancient black spruce stand. As they stepped on the ground, it sank several inches below their feet. Then it bounced right back.

The cold temperatures of northern Canada slow down the microbes that eat the dead moss and leaves on the ground. Inches, or sometimes several feet, of organic matter remain on the soil even as new trees, moss and lichen, one of the caribou’s favorite foods, grow on top.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soils. The acidic nature of the trees’ needles helps slow down decomposition and its bushy branches help catch snow, making soils colder during winter.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soil.

As the researchers approached the burned patch, walking became harder. The ground was now full of enormous potholes covered by thin layers of singed plants. The black spruce trees, many more than a century old, had all fallen, their blackened roots sticking up to the sky, many of their seeds dead.

“It looks like the trees melted,” Dr. Baltzer said.

Austin McIntosh, a technician, and Kyle Fennig, a research assistant, grabbed a tool to measure how much of the soil had combusted. In some patches, more than half of the organic matter in the ground was gone.

Their measurements were perhaps a glimpse into the future of that ecosystem. The amount of carbon that soils hold after the spruce trees are gone can fall by up to 80 percent, a recent study showed. It then takes several decades for the forest to restore it.

Kyle Fennig, left, and Maya Provenzano, students at Wilfrid Laurier University, gathered data in a stand of black spruce that burned during the 2023 fire season, near Behchoko.

 

The top of a soil core sample is dotted with organic material, including Geopyxis carbonaria, pixie cup lichen and green polytricha moss.

When fires kill off black spruce trees, they are often replaced by other native trees, such as birch or aspen. These species survive in part because they grow a lot faster. But because they drop their leaves every year, which stops mosses from growing, the soil around these trees doesn’t store as much carbon.

Some researchers have found these fast-growing, less flammable trees can help protect black spruce seedlings. But researchers fear that the era of more frequent fires has broken that balance because spruce trees are killed off too quickly.

When Dr. Baltzer pulled on one section of burned soil, as if it were a thick wool rug, there was ice below. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long, she told the team. Now that the organic layer protecting the frozen soil was gone, it would thaw quickly, completely changing this corner of the ecosystem. What would happen next would depend on how wet the soil would become.

“I would expect this to get wetter,” she said. Maybe other trees, like larch, could grow here then. “But possibly not black spruce.”

At scale, the implications of how well the black spruce fares in places like this could change how scientists expect global warming to play out in the future. Put together, the soils of the Arctic and the boreal forests, which stretch from North America to Asia and Europe, store almost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere.

 

‘No more water’

Chief Fred Sangris of the community of Ndilo.

For the Dene First Nations, which have lived in the boreal forests of the Northwest Territories for centuries, the menacing forces of the new age of wildfires are a consequence of the deep transformations they have watched unfold around them for years.

Chief Fred Sangris, of the community of Ndilo on the edge of Yellowknife, the territorial capital, has seen the permafrost melt into large ponds, and ancient trees sink as their roots lost their grip on the mushy soils. He noticed new islands emerging when the water levels at the Great Slave Lake sank to record lows. And he felt the peat soils, once as soft as mattresses, dry up and harden.

As Chief Sangris walked in the old-growth forests of Dettah, the hamlet where he grew up some 15 miles south of Yellowknife, he couldn’t find any of the black spruce gum that the Dene people use to make teas that help treat upset stomachs. The trees had all turned gray.

“These trees are dying because there’s no more water,” he said, as the soil crackled below his feet. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The ecosystem that is a central part of much of Dene culture had changed before Chief Sangris’s eyes. He grew up collecting berries, fishing and hunting caribou in these lands. But caribou populations have long been declining and finding ripe berries in drier forests has become harder.

More than half the population in the Northwest Territories’ 42,000 people are Indigenous. First Nations officials are now pushing for a bigger role in shaping policy on topics like fire management and evacuation strategies.

They are worried about protecting communities that had never been under wildfire threat. The Dene hamlets of Dettah, Behchoko and Ndilo were evacuated for the first time last year. So was Yellowknife, a city of 20,000 that has historically been a safe harbor to communities deeper in the forest.

The burned remains of a gallery and gift shop in Enterprise

A section of forest that burned in last year’s fires is visible from the road between Kakisa and Enterprise.

Weeks after the trip to the Northwest Territories, Dr. Baltzer said, the images of the burned forests were still in her mind. She felt confident that the data her team collected would help manage wildlife and protect First Nations communities. Given how huge the boreal forests are, her research could help shed light on which parts of the ecosystem were most important to protect.

The research is also poised to help improve the global models that forecast how climate change will affect the planet. Estimates from a United Nations panel of experts project that, sometime in the next decade, global temperatures will rise to a sustained level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, from the current level of about 1.2 or 1.3 degrees. If temperatures rise above that, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction will become significantly harder for humanity to handle.

Extreme fires like last year’s that ravage enormous tracts of forests are “completely absent from the current climate models,” said Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, near Paris, who tracks carbon dioxide emissions.

Because of that, he said, “the models are probably too optimistic.”

As he stood at the edge of the lake by Dettah, Chief Sangris watched small fishing boats cross the blue waters, glistening in the sun. He recounted his community’s efforts to adapt to the changes around them across several generations. They built fire breaks, found evacuation routes, fought mining interests and developed programs to grow more food locally so they wouldn’t need to rely on the forest as much as they have in the past. Their goal was to stay on their ancestral land.

“You put your canoe here, you’re in the wilderness,” he said. “We’re not moving. This is our home.”