Fire Weather

Despite being virtually unknown outside of Canada and the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray has become, in the past two decades, the fourth-largest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. In terms of overtime logged and dollars earned, it is, without a doubt, the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on t

The Carr Fire, as it came to be known, ignited on July 23 near the hamlet of Whiskeytown, fifteen miles west of Redding, due to sparks thrown by a trailer wheel with a flat tire. Three days later, the fire roared into the city. The temperature that day was similar to Black Saturday, 2009: 113°F (tying a local record that was 13°F above the average

In the 1990s, pyroCbs were a disturbing but exhilarating novelty wondered at, and discussed by, a small group of meteorologists. Now, they are not only a signature of major wildfires, they are actively growing in size and frequency—to the point that they are mimicking volcanoes, previously Earth’s most rapid and powerful climate-changing agents. Py

Until relatively recently, great bergs of solid bitumen would appear spontaneously on the surface of the Dead Sea, where it would float due to the water’s exceptional buoyancy. This phenomenon occurred so predictably that, in ancient times, the Dead Sea was known as Asphalt Lake.

If one were to ascribe a specific date to the dawn of modern climate science, a strong case could be made for August 23, 1856—though its significance went unrecognized for 150 years. Eunice Newton Foote was an artist, inventor, citizen scientist, and early suffragist from upstate New York whose singular contribution to climate science was lost in p

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator. Some of these pipelines are four feet in diameter, and much of the petroleum flowing through them is extracted using unconventional methods like fracking, steam-assisted gravity drainage, and

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel.

According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground.

a fire service pilot estimated head fire heights at a hundred yards, and a number of victims perished in their cars, overtaken by flames even as they fled at highway speed. But there was another killing energy released by those fires that moved even faster—at the speed of light. So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday that animal