Meanwhile, in the Arctic, Fires on the Increase

Bookmark this for the next person that tells you “forest management” is the cause of increasing wildfires.

There are no forests in Greenland.

Guardian:

Scientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week of each other on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month.

Fires were burning close to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second largest town and a popular tourism centre, on 14 and 15 June, satellite imagery has shown, while a second blaze hit Kujalleq, on the island’s southern tip, on 17 June.

While most of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory, is covered in vast ice sheets and thick glaciers, a significant part is ice-free and covered in tundra. Wildfires in these areas are rare, but becoming more common.

For two fires to break out this early in the summer, however, is particularly unusual. “Vegetation fires at high northern latitudes are more usual in July and August,” said Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Sonja Diaz, a scientist at the Environmental Change Research Unit of the University of Helsinki, who conducted field research in Greenland after a major wildfire in 2019, said the timing was not unheard of but that it felt “quite wild” to see the island burning so early in the year.

“Wet [conditions] and snow do not favour fire ignition and spread,” she said. “The conditions need to be warm and dry enough.”

Inunnguaq Eigil Lundblad, the emergency manager for Qeqqata municipality, which includes Sisimiut, said the fires there had broken out after “someone used fire recklessly. We had not had much snow this winter and then very little rainfall, which is why we have very dry soil.”

Miki Sikemsen, the emergency manager for Kujalleq municipality, said the immediate trigger for the fire there was not yet known, but added: “Weather conditions in the area have been unusually dry this year and we have not experienced any significant rainfall since May, which has left the vegetation very dry and highly flammable.”

The anthropologist Pelle Tejsner, an associate professor at the University of Greenland, said the dryness of the soil meant “more fires could be expected”.

A study of fires in ice-free regions of western Greenland did not detect any blazes from 1995 to 2007. It then recorded 21 separate events between 2008 and 2020, with major fires in 2017 and 2019.

NASA:

The number of wildland fires burning in the Arctic is on the rise, according to NASA researchers. Moreover, these blazes are burning larger, hotter, and longer than they did in previous decades. 

These trends are closely tied to the region’s rapidly changing climate. The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the global average, a shift that directly impacts rain and snow in the region and decreases soil moisture, both of which make the landscape more flammable. Lightning, the primary ignition source of Arctic fires, is also occurring farther north. These findings are detailed in a report published in 2025 by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), a working group of the Arctic Council. 

“Fire has always been a part of boreal and Arctic landscapes, but now it’s starting to act in more extreme ways that mimic what we’ve seen in the temperate and the tropical areas,” said Jessica McCarty, Deputy Earth Science Division Chief at NASA’s Ames Research Center and an Arctic fire specialist. McCarty, the report’s lead author, worked as part of an international team for AMAP.

But it’s not just the number of fires that concerns scientists; it’s how hot they burn. 

“It’s the intensity that worries us the most because it has the most profound impact on how ecosystems are changing,” said Tatiana Loboda, chair of the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland.