Rise of the underground inferno

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Sept. 24, 2024

Firefighters respond to months-old wildfires in Fox Lake, Alberta, Canada, in February.  Photographer: Government of Alberta

Read the story From Indonesian peatlands to the Arctic tundra, intense wildfires are increasingly creeping below the surface, decimating landscapes and pumping huge stores of carbon into the atmosphere.  These little-studied underground blazes—sometimes so deep that firefighters and satellites see no visible flame—are extremely difficult to extinguish. Preventing them altogether, more so. As the arctic heats, wet peat below the surface is drying out and becoming more susceptible to months-long infernos. Further afield, more direct human intervention including drainage of peatland for agriculture is exposing vast subterranean deposits to fire risk. "I refer to it as the confluence of climate, fuels and people," says Desert Research Institute professor Tim Brown. "All three are connected."  Read The Big Take.

Listen to the podcast The exploding pagers incident in Lebanon points to a global problem that national security officials say is now "rampant." On today's podcast, Bloomberg's Katrina Manson and Peter Martin discuss what we know about supply chain interference, and what countries like the US and China are doing to protect their technology from interference. Subscribe and listen on iHeart, Apple and Spotify.

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