PyroCB. May 29 2023, 150kms North West of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Location -112.841026,58.040894. Scale: circle radius is 75kms
PYROCENE FIRE CLOUDS - CANADA 2023
Did you experience smoke from far-distant fire this year?
Though massive wildfires have recently ravaged Canada's northern forests, these ancient woodlands have evolved over millennia to thrive with fire. The boreal forest first sprouted after the last ice age. Its mix of hardy conifers, deciduous birch, and aspen adapted to the frequent lightning-sparked blazes that renew the biota.
What once were renewal cycles have become devastation because their intensity and frequency have increased, a pattern that became noticeable in the past 20 years. Beyond links to the heating planet, the question of the forest reaching a tipping point of collapse or the limit of burning it can safely handle became an evolving and sobering story this year.
In the fire season of 2023, 147 PyroCB fires were reported. A pyrocumulonimbus fire, or pyroCb, is an extreme, rare type of wildfire that generates its own weather system as it burns. Hot air and smoke from the intense fire below forms a vertical cloud column that can reach up to 6-10 miles in altitude. These explosive plumes bring chaotic winds, lightning strikes, and ember showers for miles around the fire. They essentially create their own thunderstorms, with erratic and dangerous fire behaviour below them.
The images below are range of fire clouds observed between May and September 2023 over the mainland of Canada’s boreal forest.
For more text, scroll below the images…
Continued…
Once a rare occurrence, the frequency of the PyroCB this year is unprecedented. On. May 8, 2023, we noticed the early activity and its similarities to the catastrophic PyroCb fire that occurred in Fort McMurray, Alberta, on May 3, 2016 (Songs of The Dead). Realising the potential danger of the season, we began to chart the cloud activity as microcosms of Earth to support the theory of an Age of Fire - the Pyrocene ( Pyne, 2015*), an epoch characterized by the prevalence of fires.
How the Boreal Forest burns has drastically changed and is impacting communities, big and small, in Canada and across North America with smoke. However, it is also important to understand the impact of this change on people and places globally. During my visit to Fort McMurray between October 2016 and February 2017, I had an opportunity to discuss this matter with Earth System Scientist Will Steffen (1947 - 2023). This research helps to gain a scientific perspective on the local damage caused by the Fort McMurray fires and the link to the potential collapse of the Boreal forest if it reaches the tipping point he predicted.
The circular form references this discussion and the Planetary Boundaries model, which Steffen worked on at the Stockholm Resilience Center, which describes how humans have negatively impacted the chemistry of the Earth beyond safe operating boundaries. The model demonstrates how human activity now affects the Earth's climate and ecosystems more than ever before, putting the stability of the entire planet at risk.
* The Fire Age, how humans made fire and fire made us human. Stephen J. Pyne, 2016.
*All Images have been made with data from the European Space Agency between May 2023 and August 2023 and modified in our studio. They are available as high-resolution images on request.
Above: The evolution of the planetary boundaries framework. Published 13 Sep 2023. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries.
Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Based on Richardson et al. 2023, Steffen et al. 2015, and Rockström et al. 2009
On The Line, 2019.
I visited the aftermath of the 2016 PyroCB fire in Alberta's Fort McMurray, which led to the evacuation of 80,000 people. Follow the links below to view ground-level photographs of the PyroCB fire event.
Crude, Cataclysmic and … Manufactured? How the Horse River Fire continues to inform our upcoming monograph
Firegrams will be featured in an upcoming Monograph, supported by landscape photography and writing by Antoinette Johnson. You can read more about the monograph in a blog post here.
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All images © Alan McFetridge