Of a local or to. Come up the unknown who can come to the floor put in a call to get people. All over the world make a farmers are destroying entire towns and regions. And circle. Like a Freight Train coming torture. These compounds. Make a farmers are different they are beyond our control they are insatiable see here they may go what the precise since some time to clear the dust. Mites will be dropping when. Paper dollar bills from your airplanes for all the good thats gone on the fire. We are in conflict with nature but why has it unleashed this inferno on our forests and homes. In many areas were literally sitting 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 of the laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire. Going pump and dump off air on this it does help push it up to create. Fear and. Also under scrutiny our own role in creating this crisis. Because of all the fire a social problem is that going to use before when nobody could win the interim and. Its really up to humans to figure out how to rebalance everything and we can do that its a race against time to save our habitat and our lives and we have about 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 its business as usual. Part of living here as you get used to forest fires. And you get used to smoke from a big part of the summer and so nobody really worries my and small crew floats and to 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 sand Everything Everything that you have nobody has ever said sending everything. And nobody expected the fire to attack peoples homes. The very 1st place we were dispatched was this area in. Terrorism 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 burned to ashes. It just cost them last day after day after day and its really wasnt safe for us to be in there anymore. But here we are leaving the room to vote. You know i can feel the heat here. In theory. 88000 people the whole town ran for their lives. In crazy. Were an industry town based on oil based on shift work so in the middle of the day. Theres thousands of people that could be sleeping. We started knocking on doors we use the speaker systems on our cars are allowed healers the city was announcing and its time to leave. You can see the big red line that runs through the middle is our highway 63 and thats the main highway through town its the only way out. Everyone whos 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 a month in emergency shelters. Nobody died in that fire is the absolute best we could hope for to get everybody out and save those lives. The beast swallowed several 1000 homes and 5000 square kilometers of forest. 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 some. Iberia they have reached china indonesia and australia the worlds forests are on fire. 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 lets go it mary if you want. The forest fires in italy continue to off to affect the south there regions of the kountry particular city firefighter claire cover leskie has firsthand experience battling flames now she helps European Countries tackle wildfires. And for workers all very sick possible know how just she didnt tell you. I want back to the can for the community or shouldering zone or the divorce rate on here or in some tender for mid twentys when they were little god still haunts him more or it. Or get more and performs he was. Made for. Mega fires can be seen from space. Europes satellites are on far watch and capturing some worrying trends. In the tunnels going to live on the wanted to call the national into the prison prefect of the food on the exam to do i got this on the media event to produce some pass on the song this is the best way to do this if a toy. More extreme fires also struck in portugal and spain. The month of film is the 1st on the fair its a beautiful. It was a will produce is ofa toy taken additional scholorship. Fires are now striking all year round in california we sell to shoot blazes in november and over christmas. Jim fucked me compared to yesterday twice as much forest and spent in sweden. Unexpectedly make of fires are also threatening New Territories in the north on them it is you dont want food sometimes austrade oh you mean on that in my own porno unit when you cross a feature and want to some perfect us if you know men or do it. At all its a time when you were to die now then. All over the world the fires are pushing our resources to the limits of. Trade fairs for aerial Fire Fighting like here in france all for a growing arsenal of weapons for the war against far. Into. This 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 us is spending more than 2000000000. 00. But can Technology Protect Us from the fires. We have very large airplanes very large helicopters lots of equipment on the ground lots of people fire engines 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. Some folks wonder if wed just be fed 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 us is actually declining. Or getting less effectiveness so were pretty clear we cant solve this with Fire Suppression alone. If you. Can we find a different strategy to save our forests and our habitat. Today weld fire is a hungry beast that devours for us and it wasnt always like that it was a friend of man once upon a time. Far ecologist paul has 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 would have that ends 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 were 4 major road lines that were crisscrossing the country east to west from north to south and the trains in the heat of the summer would give up spire gas and they would often spread into nearby slashing grasses and so fires would start with the passage of drain. 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 Fire Fighting. A witness left to testimony. The kenyan seem to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar of a 1000 Freight Trains. Then 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 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 far. The United States forests are going to be voted on and. Smoke jumpers every firefighter. 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. You prevent forest fire. You are. I think. Fire suppression worked for a really long time from lets say 935 to 198550 years of hyper success then after 1905 we see acres burned going back up just slightly 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 ive 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 wood and finding out trees you have 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 couldnt get big that often. That patchiness is gone from the landscape during that period of 100 years and 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 actor. California and greece in 201840 mcmurry 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 moth and i stuck my finger in the flame and started to holler and cry but because i was so fast it i kept my thinker in that flame and ever since then ive been studying fire. Mike flanagan has uncovered the complex relationship that exists between fire and climate. For him thats the secret to what happened in Fort Mcmurray. Our area burned has doubled since the seventys 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 the yser soaking into the ground now because of Climate Change the snow is melting rapidly and a lot of moisture runs off so theres 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 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 dont grow as well making them more susceptible to disease insect 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 trap 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 theyre thinking its a tree and so they fly over here and then they cant fly out once they catch youre down to get into the funnel and then they fall down into the cut below. So today in this track weve captured about 35 to 50 Mountain Pine beetle in 2016 in this location each week over the course of 4 weeks we captured between 500 to a 1000 in pine beetle. And those beetles know how to plan a mass invasion here we have a drought affected tree and when theyre stressed by drought theyll emit ethylene and this and 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 off 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 pits tubes that go all the way up this and then you see all this streaming pitch coming down and thats 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 its still trying to defend itself. But drought leaves other trees too dry to produce any resin at all free entry to the party. You get thousands of the beatles 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 ways of deadly beetle attacks in france spain and even scandinavia more fodder for the next beast on the prowl. In many areas were 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 canadian match dropped last night 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 his specialty fire behavior. This this one didnt spread it was only the match burning and so this tells me that this this fuel this is not flammable today. But 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 doesnt work anymore in your fire goes out. The canadian scientists are the inventors of an ingenious system of universal warning signs. In. Countries all across the globe that have adopted the system. 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. Weve come to montana science of the big burn in 1010 to unravel the innermost mechanisms of fire. So this is the missile Fire Sciences 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 you will do many kinds of experiments burning different kinds of fuels and all of them produce a lot of smoke thats why we have to have a very large ventilation system to remove all thats what. Is. This apparatus is a big stone tilting sand 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. This is very much like an arbitrary segment of a large while and fire thats spreading outward and so what were trying to understand with this apparatus is how the heat is transferred any way 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 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 cold air has to come down and replace the volume vacated by that rising pores hot air. So its a repeating pattern of hot flames rising cold air descending heart flames rising colder it was on it. And its in the trough where the cold air is descending that its 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 you would not get it spring. Finally the secret is unravels 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. Thats going to be hot. Overnight i have to get raybans for everybody yeah ok. Were going to have the best and fun friends so its easy to sit here and read. The full ratios appetite of todays mega fires knows no boundaries the secret behind this airflow and wind. Combusts. Specialist several mcalister has found a way to simulate the process 1st she simulates an ordinary walls 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 its 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 push i dont care. No using a Chimney Service simulates the air flow of a mega fire. But its much faster much more clearly or get spark something almost every. So you can hear the flow but it creates. This flow which 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 simple line of fire you end up with an area of fuel thats 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. The fire creatures are very open with the machine to fan the flames. Nearby sensually blowing on the coals of the fire and if youve ever played with a campfire and you blew out you blow on and you can see it it glows a lot hotter and stuff that was already running its going to burn much faster stuff that was smoldering is then going to transition to flame and so youre going to involve more fuels that are going to run without that when. A mega fire is born. The rising heat and when turbulence. Even spin into far tornadoes socalled far natos which can reach the force of a hurricane and temperatures of 1000 degrees celsius. In the age of mega fires in far natos are becoming more and more common. There. Lets see how this wind machine led to the inferno in Fort Mcmurray. They have the power to send embers in 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 or dickens field. We decided to fade into 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 houses from fire. That was a difficult moment for us logically we look back and decision we made was to like right doesnt 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 doesnt stop here. It was stronger it was the engine ogust or lazy heart of the season and we heard in the news that there was so very intense fires going on in the northwest canada. Serug a kuykendall 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 something can fly the measurements here at the station. Measure objects by bouncing laser beams off them. Laser beam comes out of their gets computer through this universe and then have a sample of the beam expand there on the credit score for him expands and descend into the atmosphere and then be with a telescope to get the scattered signal back from as high as one. Long discussion. And thats how we get the information on the composition of the atmosphere. In addition to the lidar at the station sergey also used this space based calypso lidar which covers the entire globe. When they actually checked of the data from the lakers i saw something really extraordinary piece and then spiders in general. They send lots of small can i say into the stratosphere and then these plumes they cross 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. I think the smoke went from 3 to siberia and then crossed the globe in one to 2 weeks and we have been seeing it is for us here for at least 7 months that followed far. This is assuming that comes off the mother of all kind of option and this one is from this mega fire event youve been since you who found that the wildfires can have as last you booked on the atmosphere as the mother as well kind of good options. Sergei was the 1st scientist to discover that the reach of mega fires is global and out of the ordinary. Its. Every fire season our entire airspace fills up with smoke. We urgently need to find out more about the chemical composition of what were 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 plane is the world supposed to advance by laboratory the summary of the flight plan for today is to head to the shirt it fires southern arizona. And 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 that the. Thousands of chemicals that are emitted fresh smoke and how those changed 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 were flying really big fires and we have to make maneuvers like that it can feel like youre on a roller coaster which is fine but you dont want to be on a roller coaster for 8 hours its kind of a high intensity type of work but its also awesome being able to see the measurements that were making in real time. The full analysis of all the new data will take years but bob is already sounding the alarm bells the health risks links to while far smoke are enormous. Theres 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 theres even a statistic called premature deaths we know that these premature deaths increase as pollution increases. In our fire prone world risk for a tour of diseases including asthma are on the increase. And a vital activity like breathing is becoming a deadly risk. What do moment in a choir have to do with coronavirus a lot because mamas have it into bodies that can blow the miles the. Experience of experience with the fire reveal that Sharon Salzberg much further simply as when thought was channeled mama and acquires changed the world. Tomorrow to. Become 30 minutes on d w. A cycle called good cheer all for america on. The fast industry goes slow. Commuters opt for a trendsetter at 90. The roaring twentys about reloading. Is freshens 2020 style arms 21. To 60 minutes on d w. A meal time to complete the 2nd season of on the phone system back environment so about society its still about us but all the planets on the brink we spoke to several leading experts in the film about china. The Bowling Green says. The play. Place. This is developing news live from berlin tens of thousands of people saw the streets of bellaver used to protest their virtual crackdown and to dimanche new elections its the biggest challenge that president lee cushing code has faced in his 26 years in power but also coming up authorities in afghanistan to release more taliban prisoners as a precondition for pace talks about