Abstract
On June 19, 2015, a slow-moving low-pressure system with spectacular thunderstorms that produced little rain began making its way through the Alaskan interior. When the storms finally petered out about a week later, 61,000 bolts of lightning—15,000 in one remarkably electric day—had been unleashed on a boreal forest in the state’s interior. No one had ever seen anything quite like it, not even in 2004, when 8,500 lightning strikes were recorded in one day.
After the smoke and the prayers ascend to God, the angel fills the censer with fire, from the altar, and throws it to the Earth causing noises, thunderings, lightnings, and an earthquake.… The first angel of seven sounded his trumpet: “And hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to the earth” burning a third of the Earth’s flora, scorching all green grass.
— Book of Revelation
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Notes
- 1.
“Lightning Triggers Fires Across Alaska,” Earth Observatory image, June 22, 2004, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=4591.
- 2.
Alaska Division of Forestry, “Alaska’s First Wildfire of 2016 Reported near Delta Junction,” Alaska Wildland Fire Information, February 22, 2016, https://akfireinfo.com/2016/02/22/alaskas-first-wildfire-of-2016-reported-near-delta-junction/.
- 3.
Personal communication with Glenn Juday re: Claire Parkinson and William W. Kellogg, “Arctic Sea Ice Decay Simulated for a CO2-Induced Temperature Rise,” Climatic Change 2, no. 2 (June 1979): 149–62, doi:10.1007/BF00133221.
- 4.
“Scientists Discount Drought Tie to ‘Greenhouse’ Warmth Trend,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1988.
- 5.
Daniel H. Mann et al., “Is Alaska’s Boreal Forest Now Crossing a Major Ecological Threshold?,” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 44, no. 3 (2012): 319–31, http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1657/1938-4246-44.3.319.
- 6.
Eccentricity is the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Axial tilt is the inclination of Earth’s axis in relation to its plane of orbit around the sun. Precession is Earth’s slow wobble as it spins on its axis.
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© 2017 Edward Struzik
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Struzik, E. (2017). Fire on Ice. In: Firestorm. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-819-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-819-0_9
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