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Flames from the Donnie Creek wildfire burn along a ridge top north of Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, July 2, 2023. /CFP
Extreme fires in Canada in 2023 emitted more carbon than many industrialized nations, and the emissions were bigger than anything in the record for Canada, according to a new NASA study published on Wednesday.
Stoked by Canada's warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million tonnes of carbon, NASA scientists have found.
That is comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
Smoke rises from a wildfire near Barrington Lake in Nova Scotia's Shelburne County, Canada, May 28, 2023. /CFP
The research team used satellite observations and advanced computing to quantify the carbon emissions of the fires, which burned from May to September 2023.
They found that the Canadian fires released more carbon in five months than Russia or Japan emitted from fossil fuels in all of 2022.
"What we found was that the fire emissions were bigger than anything in the record for Canada," said Brendan Byrne, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the lead author of the study.
Fire emissions are typically reabsorbed as forests regrow, unlike fossil fuel emissions. But if these events become more typical, they could impact global climate, according to the study.