Why the forest fires were in Australia so devastating

Totally, the fire are not defeated in Australia. Also a year and a half after the beginning of the in many respects unusual fire season, blazes in some regions.

Why the forest fires were in Australia so devastating

Totally, the fire are not defeated in Australia. Also a year and a half after the beginning of the in many respects unusual fire season, blazes in some regions. Other parts of the country are already flooded by heavy rainfall. With the rain also the Phase of the scientific reappraisal of the fires continues to the end of the Australian summer, as a collection of contributions to a discussion in the journal Nature Climate Change shows.

The most recent fire season was, so the common conclusion of the various publications is "extreme". Even for a continent that belongs to the fire, such as Koalas and kangaroos, was about the turn of the year 2019/20, an unusual combination of fire-accelerating factors, and have led to exceptionally severe consequences for the human as well as all the other inhabitants.

Australia has lost by Bush fires, more than a billion animals.

Not only the fire season began in September and so quite early. Also that the fire in wide areas in the temperate Broadleaf and mixed forests in the States of New South Wales and Victoria, has spread, is not considered to be normal. Usually only small areas of burning in these forests that are wet for extended fire. Writing, Matthias Boer, from the Western Sydney University, and Victor Resco de Dios, and Ross Bradstock from the Spanish University of Lleida.

Big Koala-Die

Until the beginning of January of this year were more than 20 percent of such forest areas affected. Overall, the flames have destroyed more than twelve million hectares of Land, equivalent to about one-third of the area of Germany. More than 30 people died in the flames.

died How many animals can only be estimated. The Ecologist Chris Dickmann from the University of Sydney, speaks of more than a billion of animal sacrifice, insects not yet taken into account. Alone in the heavily affected state of New South Wales may have died up to 85 percent of all the Koalas, presumed to be an Australian representative of the conservation organization WWF.

sure, there is a need for a change in policy away from a carbon based economy and towards more climate-friendliness, challenge the authors.

Not shown in these Figures, expected later in the victim are included. The surviving animals will find difficult to feed, water and habitat. Also unusually, the auxiliary measures, as requested by a group of animal rights activists in the social media. Who could handle knitting needles, and sewing or other hand work is familiar to pouches for orphaned kangaroo young animals, or protective gloves for burned Koala, please send paws. The call was a success: donations are numerous and, among other things, even from Hong Kong, the USA, the UK, France and Germany had come, quoted by the Reuters news Agency, an initiator of the project.

Henriette Jager and Charles Coutant of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, actions such as this judge in "Nature Climate Change" is ambivalent. On the one hand, it will show the global sympathy and the urge of many people to help in concrete terms. On the other hand, knitted mittens for Koalas took itself a little, if there is of the eucalyptus forests, the needed the animals to Survive much urgent, only a few. Necessary larger-scale measures: perhaps even the afforestation of the forests are therefore, by dropping seeds from the air. But there is a need for a change in policy away from a carbon based economy and towards more climate-friendliness, challenge the authors.

Strong weather is phenomena

the climate has helped change the unusually strong fires, as safe. It is unclear how both in the Detail and what percentage of exactly the higher temperatures and longer had dry times on the extension of the flames. For further insights to do this, researchers hope, among other things, of a so-called attribution study, the results of which will soon be available.

special attention must be paid to the unusually high temperatures and very low rainfall, argues a Team led by Andrew King of the University of Melbourne in "Nature Climate Change". Three meteorological phenomena met in this season, of which every individual reduces the rainfall over Australia.

The human being is the most difficult predictable factor

Two of these events, El Niño and the Indian ocean dipole, describe greatly varying water temperatures of the sea surface. The influence of the rain quantities in a variety of ways: While it was wet in East Africa unusual – which is why locusts, there could extremely multiply good and to the plague, were, dried up Australia. Added to this was a special wind situation over the Antarctic, which increased over detours also, the drought in Australia. "The connection between fire and climate is extremely complex," write Benjamin Sanderson of the University of Toulouse and the atmosphere of researcher Rosie Fisher from Boulder, Colorado.

in addition to meteorological conditions, a notoriously hard-to-calculate factor plays an important role in the question of how fast and far the Bush fires spread: the man and how he reacts to the flame. In Detail, a statement to be meaningful forecasts for future Bush fires are so far hardly possible, my Sanderson and Fisher.

Nevertheless, you view, the sounds everything else than reassuring: If the emissions continue to rise, will an Australian summer like the past "by 2040, around, on average, to be around and very cool to 2060".

Created: 02.03.2020, 20:29 PM

Date Of Update: 03 March 2020, 09:00
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