How Combustion Causes the Wildfires

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By Sophia Kaisermann

For the past decades, wildfires have been haunting the world by destroying homes and cities. Wildfires are destructive open fires that spreads quickly because of their combustibility.  They have been happening all across the world,in places such as Russia, Canada, Portugal, and Australia, but the majority of people are most familiar with the California wildfires.

Since they spread very quickly and last long periods of time, wildfires affect a lot of land. One example is the 2003 Siberian Taiga Fires in Russia, it burned 47 million acres of land and holds the record of largest wildfire ever. In November 2018, California was hit by its biggest wildfire in a century, the Camp Fire. It burned 6,453 homes and killed at least 29 people.

These horrible fires are a result of combustion. Combustion is a reaction between fuel and oxygen. For it to happen, the fire triangle must be present: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. As explained by National Geographic, "Fuel is any flammable material surrounding a fire, including trees, grasses, brush, even homes. The greater an area's fuel load, the more intense the fire. Air supplies the oxygen a fire needs to burn. Heat sources help spark the wildfire and bring fuel to temperatures hot enough to ignite." What makes wildfires more dangerous than a small house fire is the abundance of oxygen. When a fire happens inside a home, firefighters always check for closed windows not only so that the fire won't escape but also so that no more oxygen will come in and keep the fire burning. However, when the fire is out in the open, nothing can keep the oxygen away from the fuel, therefore the fire keeps burning.

Currently, there is no way to fully prevent a wildfire. However, there are many guides on how to prepare for one, be ready for evacuation, and preventing man-made wildfires. I believe that there will be more reliable and useful ways to stop the fires from spreading in the future, but that it is very unlikely that there will be a way to fully stop wildfires from happening.

Works Cited:

https://www.livescience.com/wildfires.html 

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/313/5789/940.full 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/wildfires/ 

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps 

https://www.ready.gov/wildfires 

https://www.independent.co.uk/california-wildfire-camp-fire-paradise 

 http://time.com/california-wildfires-fires-climate-change/

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