Researchers Study Whether Fighting Arctic Fires Can Protect Permafrost Carbon

The problem is visible near the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In July 2021, a wildfire, possibly sparked by lightning, burned through black spruce and paper birch on the university’s northern campus. It spread across dry feather mosses and lichen, climbed into tree crowns and, by the time fire agencies responded, produced 12-foot flames and a 500-foot column of smoke.

A few days before the five-year anniversary of the Yankovich Road Fire, three members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium walked into the boreal forest along cross-country ski trails. In 2024 the organization helped turn the area into an educational walking trail with interpretive signs. About a half-mile in, the group reached a stand of bare, blackened trunks. Hilary Shook, the consortium’s coordinator, used a T-shaped thaw probe to find the upper boundary of permafrost. Just outside the burn scar, the ground hit the concrete-like layer about a foot below the surface. Inside the scar, where fire had burned away moss and organic-rich topsoil that insulates the permafrost, the probe plunged at least three times deeper. “That was an immediate effect of the fire,” said Alison York, the organization’s outgoing coordinator. “When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit.”

Permafrost underlies about 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, the report said. As climate change drives more frequent and severe fires, thawing allows organic matter to break down and release greenhouse gases, contributing to more warming, more fires and further thaw. In Canada, intensifying wildfires in 2023 released more carbon than the nation’s combined fossil fuel emissions. Many such megafires occur in vast remote areas where policy is to let them burn so long as they do not threaten human habitats. If warming and fires are left unchecked, boreal forests and permafrost could increasingly shift from carbon sinks to sources.

International teams in the US, Canada and elsewhere are trying to understand the financial and ecological stakes. They are examining preventive measures such as controlled burns and studying rapid detection and extinguishing of fires before they grow out of control. They are also exploring what the report describes as once unthinkable: sending human firefighters not to save lives or structures but to protect a major store of carbon. “We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire,” Brendan Rogers, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said. “I do think that it can make a meaningful difference.”

Woodwell, the University of Victoria’s Polis Institute for Ecological Governance and the nonprofit Alaska Venture Fund are partnering on a multimillion-dollar initiative called North Fire to study and raise public awareness about the potential benefits of such interventions, the report said. The idea is complicated and controversial. Wildfire is a natural and necessary part of healthy forest ecosystems; preventing or suppressing fires across huge stretches of largely unmanaged Arctic-boreal forests and tundra would take vast resources; and it is not yet clear how much difference such interventions would make in emissions. The report said the fact that researchers are considering such extreme interventions reflects the dangers created by continuing to generate more greenhouse-gas emissions each year.