Earth Protect Blog

By Simon Romero

© The New York Times Co.

ANDERSON, ALASKA » In the wilds north of Denali, North America’s tallest mountain, the U.S. military built a radar installation near Russian airspace during the Cold War, to detect incoming ballistic missiles in the event of a nuclear strike.

As drought dried out parts of the Alaskan wilderness this summer, the complex came under attack — not by foreign forces, but by wildfire.

In the battle against the flames, an elite federal unit of smoke jumpers parachuted into dense spruce forests to clear a landing zone for fire crews. Nearly 600 firefighters fanned out in trucks, boats and amphibious vehicles to reach other remote areas around the Teklanika River. A helicopter crashed after taking off from a nearby airstrip, killing the seasoned pilot who was moving equipment to the front lines.

“This place felt like a war zone,” said Don DeBlauw, 73, a retired construction worker who evacuated from his home near the installation in June when the flames reached his yard, torching hundreds of surrounding trees that were primed to burn. “Black spruce,” he said. “They call it gasoline on a stick for a reason.”

When crews finally got the blaze under control after about a month, they had managed to save the prized radar installation, now known as Clear Space Force Station and operated by the newest branch of the U.S. military. But the lightningsparked Clear fire, as it was named, left a charred landscape of 72,000 acres in the wilderness around Anderson, Alaska.

A bewildering stew of factors, from spikes in intense lightning storms to a buildup of flammable grasses on thawing tundra, is driving the surge in wildfires across America’s largest state. Faced with the rapid warming of the Arctic from climate change, people living in Alaska’s fire zones are bracing for the likelihood that this year’s blazes are merely a glimpse of even larger megafires to come.

Six of the 10 largest wildfires in the United States this year have burned in Alaska. Several are still smoldering, raising fears over what are called “zombie fires” or “sleeping dragons” — fires that appear to go dark with the arrival of rains and snow but actually burn slowly close to the ground through winter and erupt again in spring.

Until rains began drenching the state in July, over 550 wildland fires had torched 3 million acres statewide — more than the total acreage burned this year in the other 49 states combined, and nearly three times the annual average for Alaska over the past decade.

The fires were driven in part by a severe drought in the south-central region of the state, where more than half of Alaska’s population lives. For the first time in recorded history, temperatures in Anchorage went above 60 degrees every day in June, and the city received near-record-low precipitation.

Alaska is not alone among places in the high northern latitudes that are burning this summer. Nearly 200 fires recently scorched northern Canada, while fires in Russia’s Far East in July created rivers of smoke across parts of Siberia that were seen by satellites.

Alaska exemplifies how northern fires are growing far more destructive. Even before this year’s surge, blazes had burned more than 31.4 million acres from 2001 to 2020, more than twice the area scorched in the previous two decades, according to the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks.

Wildfires in Alaska are exceptionally difficult to combat. The Clear fire showcased the challenge of trying to contain a blaze tearing through vast tracts of boreal forest.

Instead of containing a wildfire — by creating a perimeter to keep it from spreading, as is often the practice in the contiguous United States — crews in Alaska often opt for a “point protection” strategy that shields remote homes or critical infrastructure, but effectively allows the fire to burn across tundra and large forested areas.