7/29/2023 0 Comments Alaska lightning map![]() In 20, some of the largest fires ever recorded burned across vast swaths of Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories. “When I first came to Fairbanks, I’d see a thunderstorm and I’d be surprised,” says Uma Bhatt, a meteorologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who has studied lightning’s rise in the Arctic and has lived in the state for 22 years. Scientists weren’t really thinking about Arctic lightning back then either: It was so rare that even researchers who had spent decades of summers in the region might have never seen a flash. One elder recalled having seen a single storm in the 1930s, when she was only five years old. ![]() In 2002, when researchers interviewed Indigenous elders from an Arctic community in northwest Canada, none could remember seeing more than a few lightning storms in their lifetimes. ![]() “The previous numbers have been small, but it could have a really big climate impact,” says Yang Chen, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, and the lead author of one of the new studies, published in Nature Climate Change. Increased lightning is a worrying sign of today’s rapidly accelerating climate change, scientists say, but they’re also concerned for the future: More lightning could set off a cascade of ecological shifts that could release huge Arctic reserves of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating warming further. Another study suggests that the number of Arctic flashes may have tripled within the last decade alone-though some researchers question that result. One recent study projects that the occurrence of lightning in the Arctic could double by the end of the century. But as the region warms rapidly, it may become more common-with effects that could reach outside the Arctic. Lightning in the Arctic used to be so vanishingly rare that people could go their whole lives without seeing a flash.
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