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the love of the club one of. the but again you don't look uncomfortable to call the guy. all over the world make a fires are destroying entire towns and reach. the red circle. like a freight train coming torture. case how much. make a farmers are different they are beyond our control they are insatiable is here to get what the precise since some part of your clear it does son. my son will be dropping wet paper dollar bills from your airplanes for all the good it's going to not buy. we are in conflict with nature. but why has it unleashed this

inferno on our forests and homes. in many areas we're literally setting on a powder keg we need to face some tough true. scientists and firefighters are taking up the challenge with new methods. this is the missile fire science laboratory the entire building is filled with it will studying fire. these are going on from gulf of fair for this to this couple shipped to korea. and . also under scrutiny our own role in creating this crisis. because of all of the fire a social problems start going 3 years before when nobody when the enjoyment. is really up to humans to figure out how to rebalance everything and we can do that it's a race against time to save our habitat and our lives and we have 20 years to get

the needed work done. how can we survive the new era of mega fires. may 1st 2016 in fort mcmurray canada. a forest fire starts belching out smoke but for people in this prosperous oil sands town it's business as usual. part of living here is you get used to forest fires and you get used to smoke for a big part of the summer and so nobody really worries when small craft floats and town. but this time the town was faced with

a mega fire. suddenly of 911 alarm went off it was actually. the city dispatcher who said hey it looks like this fire is going to make contact with the city we need your help and our captain said well what do you need how much do you need and they said and everything everything that you have nobody has ever said send everything. and nobody expected the fire to attack people's homes. the very 1st place we were just bash was a stereo in scope railing terrorists and about 5 minutes after we took this short and 2nd video there were stand houses on fire. and.

a 1000 firefighters were mobilized from all over canada. but they were powerless before the destructive force of what locals called the beast. in just a few days 3 suburbs were burnt to ashes. it just cost the last day after day after day and it's really wasn't safe for us to be in there anymore. but here we are leaving the room to vote. you know got a dog i can feel the heat here. in theory fully. 88000 people the whole town. ran for their lives. in grief. we're an industry

town based on oil and based on shift work so in the middle of the day. there's thousands of people that could be sleeping. we started knocking on doors we use the speaker systems in our cars or loud healers the city was announcing that it's time to leave. you can see the big red line that runs through the middle as our highway 63 and that's the main highway through town it's the only way out. everyone who's trying to get out at the same time the gas stations are running out of gasoline i had like a quarter of a tank of gas that we were panicked about and then as we got maybe 40 minutes out of town everything hit me and i realized. i might never see you again. adrian and

everyone else spent 2 months in emergency shelters. nobody died and not fire that is the absolute best we could hope for to get everybody out and save those lives. were the beast swallowed several 1000 homes and 5000 square kilometers of forced. ash nearly $10000000000.00 canadian dollars it was the most destructive wildfire in the history of canada. even worse the beast was not an exception but it is part of a global trend. uncontrollable make a farmers have struck in canada and in california they are burning millions of acres in the amazon and are threatening lives in europe russia and even siberia they have reached china indonesia and australia the world's forests are on far.

at this center in brussels the european union monitors emergencies around the globe from earthquakes and floods to volcano outbreaks and tropical cyclones. but a 3rd of all emergency calls are for wildfires and that is good. if you want. the forest fires in italy continue to affect the south their regions of the kountry particular city firefighter claire cover leskie has firsthand experience battling flames now she helps european countries tackle wildfires. all 3 supposed to hold this should they did tell me of a question i want back to the can for the committee the old rings on all the divorce shit on here or in some tender for me it's one issue when they were little

. or it. or get more. mega fires can be seen from space. europe satellites are on far watch and capturing some worrying trends. in the tunnels can live on the protocol the national institute of simply folk to do should look something like i was on the media event to do some pass on the phone this is the best way to do this if it's for a. more extreme fires also struck in portugal and spain. the length of the foot on the fair it's a beautiful it was on pretty good season for troy don't tell can take an additional scholorship hazel. fires are now striking all year round in

california we sold to huge blazes in november and over christmas. jim funny to me compared to yesterday twice as much forested land down to sweden. unexpectedly make of fires are also threatening new territories in the north. on the media's really good something about where australia oh you mean you don't know my you know porno unique when you can see featured months from perfect of us if in a man wanted it. different for you. it's a time when you were to any. all. all over the world the fires are pushing our resources to the limits of. trade fairs for aerial fire fighting like here in france for

a growing arsenal of weapons for the war against far. but the new technology. like simulators virtual reality and chemical flame retardants does not come cheap. e.u. countries are now spending $2000000000.00 euros a year on firefighting the u.s. is spending more than $2000000000.00. but can technology protect us from mega fires. we have very large airplanes very large helicopters lots of equipment on the ground lots of people fire in jones all of that and there is no trend that we can say that indicates that we will ever be able to control extreme wildfire. like the swedish government

which called in the army to stop a fire by bombing it in. the rush of air from the explosion snuffed out the fire. but are we winning the battle and losing the war. and some folks wonder if we just beef up fire suppression a little bit more more tankers more fire crews more retardant bombers we can deal with wildfire effectively the evidence says otherwise the return on our investment with expanding fire suppression investment in the u.s. is actually declining. for getting less effectiveness so we're pretty clear we can't solve this with fire suppression alone. you. can we find a different strategy to save our forests and our habitat. today

well the fire is a hungry beast that devours forests and it wasn't always like that it was a friend of man once upon a time. far ecologist paul his bird is an internationally renowned expert who has dedicated several decades to the question of why the fires are becoming more extreme. so the bottom line is that we need to face some tough truths. and this starts with a trip into the past to the time when european settlers arrived in the us. and the new what happens immediately expose the forest to a higher fire risk as they set up logging operations constructed homesteads and lit

fires to cook food and clear land. new technology further increase the fire risk. there are 4 major road lines that are crisscrossing the country east to west from north to south and the trains in the heat of the summer would give up spire and they would often spread into nearby slash and grasses and so fires would start with the passage of drains. the turning point was the 910 big burn. not. $910.00 was a year of drought then a sudden wind whipped up some small fires into a giant blaze all across idaho montana and washington state. this catastrophe would fundamentally change our approach to far fighting. a

witness left a testimony. the canyon seemed to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar of a 1000 freight trains. and you really thought it was the end of the world. this search for survivors and bodies went on for weeks. the big burn was the largest fire in u.s. history in just 2 days it destroyed $3000000.00 acres of forest and $1000000000.00 worth of timber. 87 people lost their lives. the community was left to traumatized. it paralyzed us with a fear of wildfire suddenly a wildfire becomes public enemy number one in the united states. a new enemy needs a new type of defense in the u.s.

and in canada a new firefighting service declared war on fire. the united states forest service people love to. smoke jumpers. fire fighters. a deadline was set all fires were to be put out by 10 am the next morning. they had to develop a machine a mechanism to be able to do that so there was new training programs and firefighting crews that had to be developed and methods had to be developed to successfully deploy people safely and put fires out. and we got so good at it that we were able to put out 95 to 98 percent of all wildfires coast to coast every single year. as most of the fires were caused by humans the all forties recruited the general

population into the war against fire with the help of a very special mascot. remember your group and forest fire. you were. i think. for suppression work for a really long time from let's say 935 to 198550 years of hyper success then after 985 we see acres burned going back up just like before the pre fire suppression era where was this benefit of fire suppression it was going away it was looking like a leaky bucket. like

to show us something i've got these great panoramic photos showing this landscape from the 1930 s. and then again today and what we see is in the 1930 s. there was so far fewer trees maybe 10 or 20 percent of the trees that we see today . and why did that happened. the small and medium size fires were really frequent on this landscape and they played an incredibly important role there burning up dead wouldn't sending out trees you had this patchwork of burned and recovering and forested area so this limited the frequency of the really large fires because fires would run into already burned places where the fuel was consumed and so they couldn't get big that often. that patchiness is gone

from the landscape. during that period of 100 years when we kept fire out of the woods all sorts of trees of different sizes and species from seedlings and saplings to small poles they filled in the spaces between the big trees and they created what we call a fuel ladder to vast areas have these fuel ladders they convey fire from the forest floor up through the branches and into the canopies of the large trees now you add a continuous puff of wind to that and that wildfire can spread through the canopy for hector after hector after hector. california and greece in 28 fort mcmurray in 2016 black saturday in australia. all these fires spread out of control because humans stacked

the furnace with decades of accumulated fuel. and now yet another manmade factor is bringing things to a head. my 1st experience of fireworks was when i was one year old it was my birthday i had a birthday cake and one candle and i was drawn to that lame like a ma and i stuck my finger in the flame and started to holler and cry but because i was so fast it i kept my finger in that flame and ever since then i've been studying fire. mike flanagan has uncovered the complex relationship that exists between fire and

climate. for him that's the secret to what happened in fort mcmurray. in canada our area burned has doubled since the seventy's and my colleagues and i attribute this to human caused climate change. in winter arboreal forests are covered with snow but instead of the snow melting slowly and know why search soaking into the ground now because of climate change the snow is melting rapidly and a lot of oyster runs off so there's not enough moisture for the trees and the vegetation during the growing season making them more prone to drought during the summer. for each degree of warming trees would need 20 percent more water but because of drought the opposite happens. and with climate change comes hotter and

drier summers which means trees lose more moisture through evaporated transpiration in other words even more water evaporates from the leaves into the atmosphere. now the trees can defend themselves by shutting down the pores. but when they do this they don't grow as well making them more susceptible to disease and fire. the impact can be seen not only in canada but all over the globe. an example is the ideal it scenery of lake tahoe on the border between california and nevada. here drought has taken a terrible toll and multiplied the fire risk. there

was an article back in april that listed the 10 most risk towns in california particularly in the sierra nevada and speech was listed as one of. a forest and conservation biologist at the university of california patricia maloney is investigating a huge catastrophe that has befallen forests in the u.s. canada and in europe. when the drought started hitting in 2015 i was really curious and wanted to know why and how some trees were dying. this is a 12 chap for capturing bark beetles and this lure here attracts the mountain pine beetle and bark beetles for the most part have very poor sight and they're thinking it's a tree and so they fly over here and then they can't fly out once they catch you're

down to get into the funnel and then they fall down into the cup below. so today in this track we've captured about 35 to 50 mountain pine beetle and 2016 in this location each week over the course of 4 weeks we captured between 502-1000 now pine beetle. and those beetles know how to plan a mass invasion. here we have a drought affected tree and when they're stressed by drought. and this beetles go by smell so they smell that the tree is stress because they can smell that ethylene so they come moving towards this tree to try to attack it and then once you have enough bark beetles that are trying to invade a tree they in turn send pheromone a chemical that basically tells all their friends to come over party in this tree.

we see a number of pitched tubes here and you can see there are many pitch tubes that go all the way up this and then you see all this streaming pitch coming down and that's a physical defense of the tree trying to pitch out and wall off the bark beetle from getting inside the tree and killing it. this tree is still alive right now it's still trying to defend itself. but drought leaves other trees too dried to produce any resin at all free entry to the party. you get thousands of beetles in there and they begin to compromise water uptake and so between a drought event and massive amounts of bark beetles this tree is just

about dead. just in california beetles have invaded and killed an estimated 120000000 trees. in europe as well heat waves and droughts have caused waves of deadly beetle attacks in france spain and even scandinavia more fodder for the next beast on the problem. in many areas we're literally sitting on a powder keg the area burned in the u.s. by wildfires and 2002 today is going to double or triple and the next 30 years. but even the biggest powder keg will only explode if the fuse is lit what makes forest fires go off. so this is the the famous 2 minute. match dropped just which really is the foundation

of our system you had to go off into the bush like we just did and light a wooden match put it down and watch it for 2 minutes. mike wotton is an eminent research scientist working for the canadian forest service is specialty fire behavior. this this one didn't spread it was only the match burning and so this tells me that this this fuel this is not flammable today. i can tell how quickly this took off that the fuels are very foul flammable here so this area would be at a high fire risk. starting shortly after the big burn the canadian scientists performed no less then 30000 match tests over 30 years to one cover the hidden mechanism of flammability. the basis of how fire spreads

all comes down to what we call the fire triangle. on one side of this triangle we have oxygen we need oxygen to burn on another side we need fuel. to burn as well and on the other we have. energy a source of heat and so we need all of these 3 sides of the triangle for fire to continue i take one of them away and that reaction doesn't work anymore and your fire goes out. the canadian scientists are the inventors of an ingenious system of universal warning signs. countries all across the globe have adopted the system and more mega fires are coming our way.

but once ignited how does a fire grow into a raging mega fire that is beyond human control. we've come to montana science of the big burn in 1010 to unravel the innermost mechanisms of fire. so this is the missile fire science laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire many different aspects of fire ecology atmospheric science smoke and mystery and fire behavior. this is one of the largest and oldest fire labs in the world. here scientists get right inside the mind of fires like the beast to find out hell the feed themselves. this is our brain chamber this is where we do many kinds of experiments burning different kinds of fuels and all of them produce

a lot of smoke that's why we have to have a very large ventilation system to remove all that smoke. this apparatus is a big stone tilting sam burner we call it big sandy it consists of a sand box here in the middle where we pump gas so we can control exactly the characteristics of the flames or. this is very much like an arbitrary segment of a large while and fire that's spreading outward and so what we're trying to understand with this apparatus is how the heat is transferred. to go ahead every minute counts when fighting a while far crews can only save lives and homes if they are in the right place at the right time but until recently fire spread could not be predicted for more than 30 minutes in advance. that's because its mechanism was unknown.

now mark and his team have solved the ancient riddle. you see very clearly those peaks and troughs and. those are actually key to how fires behave how fires spread flame gases are very low density and they want to rise up but in order for them to rise colder has to come down and replace the volume vacated by that rising parcel there. are so it's a repeating pattern of hot flames rising cold air descending heart flames rising color descending. and it's in the troughs where the cold air is descending that it's pushing the flames down into the fuel. and this forces them into the fresh fuel just ahead of the flame front advances. if this fire did not have the peak and trough pattern he would not get it. finally

the secret is unraveled of how fire spreads well like wildfire. this paves the way for a new generation of fire science and better strategies for those battling the flames on the front line. guys going to. go from they have to get ray-bans for everybody yeah ok. we're going to have the best fun boat so if you think you can raise. the 4 issues appetite of today's mega fires knows no boundaries the secret behind this airflow and wind. combustion specialist several mcalister has found a way to simulate the process. first she simulates an ordinary wall far.

so narrow i let it burn a little bit here when you can see it is a lot of unburned fuel in there so it's not burning very well. the plume of the fire is narrow so the flames can pull in fresh replacement air from all sides. but then a question in here. no using a chimney sarah simulates the air flow of a mega fire. burns much faster much more clearly or get spark something almost every. second here the flow that it creates. this flow is the result of an astonishing mechanism as the fuels accumulate and you get more and more fuel down on the ground they burn longer so instead of having a supple line of fire you end up with an area of fuel that's on fire so as that area gets bigger and bigger the plume above it gets wider and wider the hot air rushes upwards and forms a natural chimney which blocks the air coming in from above and the sides instead

the fire sucks in fresh air from down below generating strong winds on the ground. and. the fire creates a very human with machine to fan the flames. nearby sensually blowing on the coals of the fire and if you've ever played with a campfire and you blew out you blow on and you can see it that close a lot hotter and stuff that was already running it's going to burn much faster stuff that was smoldering is saying in the transition to flame and see your neck involve more fuels that are going to find out that when. a mega fire is born. the rising heat and when turbulence you can even spin it into far tornadoes so-called far nato's which going to reach. the force of a hurricane and temperatures of a $1000.00 degree celsius. in the age of mega fires far

nato's are becoming more and more common. there. let's see how this wind machine led to the inferno in fort mcmurray. they have the power to send embers and lightning far ahead of the fire sparking new ignitions all over the region. firefighters on the ground were overwhelmed and faced with tough decisions. this area sits on a kind of a corner you go left to a buffalo and right to dickens field and we had to choose if we were going to defend what buffalo. and were dickens field. we decided to

defend the dickens field stretcher forest and we ended up being able to stop the fire from getting into that neighborhood and we felt pretty good about ourselves we felt like heroes actually we felt like superheroes and that well meant and we packed up our hoses we drove around the corner and toward buffalo only to discover that 60 house was from fire. that was a difficult moment for us logically we look back and decision we made was the right right doesn't always make you feel better though. the fire of fort mcmurray has been studied by scientists all around the globe and. their investigations reveal that the impact doesn't stop here. and you will see. so in jim. lacey how do they see them and we heard in the news

that there was a very intense fires going on in the northwest canada. sergey chi cannon is from russia and a specialist in the impact of volcanic eruptions. but the air of mega fires has expanded his field of study. i thought why not check whether we see some think interlarded measurements here at the station. light are some measure objects by bouncing laser beams off the. laser beam comes out of them gets computer through this universe and then it is sent for the beam expand there on the disk or for inexpensive and this sent into the atmosphere and then b. was a telescope to get this kind of signal back from as high as one i would go in the sky. and that's how we get information on the

composition of the atmosphere. in addition to the light our at the station sergey also used this space based calypso lidar which covers the entire globe. when i should be checked of the data from the lasers i saw something really extraordinary piece and then spiders in general. they sound lots of small can i say into the stratosphere and then these plumes they crossed the atlantic in just one week and arrived in europe. passing through europe on its way east the smoke created a series of stunning sunsets. and then the smoke went further to the side. syria and then crossed the globe in going to weeks and we

have been seen it is for us here for at least 7 months that followed far. this is assuming that comes off the mother it will kind of an option and this one is from this nigga fire event if since you will find that the wildfires can have as last you booked on the atmosphere as the mothers will kind of corruptions. sergei was the 1st scientist to discover that the reach of mega fires is global and out of the ordinary. it's. every fire season our entire airspace fills up with smoke. we urgently need to find out more about the chemical composition of what we're taking in with every breath. nasa has launched an international airborne science expedition to investigate the

potential impact of this new type of pollution. one of the mission controllers is bob jocose and from montana university who has dedicated his life to understanding wild fire smoke. this flame is the world supposed to beds for a laboratory the summary of the flight plan for today is to head to the shirt in fired southern arizona. there the team members are planning to collect fresh smoke samples for their research with the help of pioneering prototypes. you have to bring the lab to the fire to the smoke to better understand the thousands of chemicals that are made it fresh smoke and how those change as the. smoke evolves in the atmosphere.

when the plane reaches the smoke plume we get strong turbulence. caused by the hot air rising from the far. when we're flying really big fires and we have to make the new 1st light that it can feel like you're on a roller coaster which is fine but you don't want to be on a roller coaster for 8 hours it's kind of a high intensity type of work but it's also awesome being able to see the measurements that we're making in real time. the full analysis of all the new data it will take years but bob is already sounding the alarm bells the health risks links to wild far smoke are enormous. there's a lot of concerns about smoke for instance the particles are solid or liquid droplets and they can clog the passageways in your lungs and they can also inject poison into your bloodstream along with the toxic gases and when those poisons get

in your bloodstream it actually changes your biochemistry in your body and that can lead to heart disease there's even a statistic called premature deaths we know that these premature deaths increase as pollution increases. in our far from world risk for a tour of diseases including asthma are on the increase. and a vital activity like grieving is becoming a deadly risk. this

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