As a fire educator at the University of Idaho I appreciated this positive shout out to fire. We need more things like this. My only complaint is that the image of a "dense" forest was of a bald cypress swamp that does not burn often anyway. With so many stock images of crowded pine stands I am not sure why that was used.
You know, I really dont understand why the news doesnt explain things like this when they speak about forest fires. Its always covered what is happened but never the underlying reasons as to why and how we can help to reach balance.
Well, usually when a fire is on the news people are more focused on putting it out rather than what started. And most of the ones big enough to make the news are started by lightning or lava, like he said. They never tell you this, but most of the human started fires don't get to be very big and are contained quickly, probably because they are close to where people frequently are so they get reported quicker, whereas a lightning strike could be at a top of a mountain where there is nothing but trees and no people there. It can sit in a tree for almost a week after the lightning strike before coming out and starting a wild fire, and even then people might not notice it for long enough for it to become dangerous if the fire is in certain places.
My uncle lives in a small town that recently burned down because of a wildfire. Only his house and a few commercial areas were spared. He saw it coming and started spraying the house down with his garden hose, just soaked everything. He lost the shed, but the house was barely singed.
I'm surprised they didn't mention the human adaptation to wildfires. For example, the Native Americans would commonly practice slash-and-burn. Other cultures did this, but usually only to farmlands. Native Americans, however, noticed how fertile land was after a wildfire and began setting off huge wildfires every decade or so, usually when they noticed a dense layer of dead leaves on the ground that began to choke out the lower lying grass and flowers. Its interesting how we, at least in america, went from taking care of not enough wildfires to causing waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many.
I’m here after a fairly fierce fire started on Table Mountain, Cape Town. I have not seen a fire move so quickly and intensely before inside a city. This is the first time that a fire moved around the mountain, gutting parts of one of Africa’s best universities (UCT) before moving into suburbs and setting trees and houses on fire. Fortunately the fire teams have brought it under control. Thanks for this video, I know a little bit more about forest fires now.
Glad to see my profession being highlighted on this video. I've got 10 years experience in many fuel types. from the northwest "rain forests" to the rocky mountains. even the swamps of the south. Different fuels cause different fire behavior. I'm curious how you got that number that 95% of fires are human caused. that might have been true 30 years ago but i don't think that's the case anymore. I'd say 80% of the fires i've been on have been caused by lightening. But I work on a hand crew. we go where there are no roads to get into the fire. This number must count all the grass fires on the side of the road and stuff like that.
I literally hiked through a wildfire this past Tuesday on my weekly hike. It had mostly run its course with only small pockets of flames, but the fire still burned underground nearly melting my boots in certain areas and continued to smolder for days after my pass through. And yes, it was due to human neglect.
In one documentary, they said that grasses are younger plants in the evolutionary than trees, and appeared around 100 million years (or a bit more, I forgot). According to that documentary, much of the land was covered in forest. Some grasses evolved to burn lightly with high temperature which led to thousands of years of global and heavy wildfires. Grass was fighting the trees, claiming territory.
I knew quite a bit about this subject, but leave it to Scishow to inform me of what I did not! I knew about the cycle of fires involving the nutrients, and providing moisture/sunlight to new vegetation, and the three factors contributing to them, but about the "sticky-water", and the science of firefighting, I was pretty clueless.
That's what I like about Sci-show. I see plenty of episodes on topics I already know a bit about, but Sci-show always goes that little bit further to explain things.
Ampphed Indeed! This show is great. The thing that bothers me is that by the time I think of a good question, it's already addressed in the QQ segment lol
One of the coolest things about large fires is their ability to create their own weather systems. (Yeah, they actually *try* to teach us firefighters science, heh. We don't just hike and smack the ground with tools all the time.) The smoke plume of large fires can produce thunderstorms, which ignite small fires in front of the head of the main fire via lightning. In an unstable atmosphere firewhirls can grow very large. In '14 there was a F1 scale tornado made out of fire in N. Cal that snapped Doug Fir like toothpicks. It's also pretty hard for people to understand why we light the forest on fire to stop forest fires. We spend a lot of our time lighting shit on fire - it's like legal arson. Greatest job in the world. :P
I once met a forest firefighter who told our group of 16 year old junior rangers that if they were to encounter a forest fire, their best bet was to run into the forest fire as no one could outrun them. And that they would be safe on the other side. Im now wondering if he hated teens.
Yes! I am watching during the wildfires in Oregon and the whole west coast, September 2020. They have been devastating, with "mega fire" being too mild a term to describe them. Reminds me of Bill Gates warning us that a pandemic could happen at any time. Both scenarios were largely ignored as possibilities, yet here I am in COVID-19 lockdown and I can't even go outside because the smokey air is not safe to breathe.
The last part of this video really amazes me. When you tell someone in your house that putting out wildfire too frequently could result in larger wildfire in the future, they would go, "Wut?" This video explains it well. Glad I didn't skip this!
Most of the wildfires in California leave confusing aftermath photos such as trees burnt from the inside with leaves still intact yet cars nearby with melted out windows and aluminum!
This was a VERY informative video and it is pretty dense too. This is a great video for school revision and I would highly recommend others to watch it as well.
Is it just me or Michael was evolving into Hank slowly as the episode progressed. Especially in the end. I thought it was actually Hank since i didn't have the window open. :D
I noticed that. It's almost like he's been working on his speech patterns and pacing to try to sound more like Hank, since a lot of people get upset when Hank's not the presenter.
raritythefabulous that's funny I like Hank s videos he seems natural. It seems like Mike tries a little harder . I still love watching . And. It's so funny if you watch their hands moving .
Rx fires literally here. Even some of our native plants won't grow without reaching sufficient heat first. But, being the lightning capitol of the world, that naturally occurs often enough without carelessness.
Isn't it astounding how something as small and simple as a beetle can lead to more wildfires. Everything is connected and has ripple effects. It's very cool and scary.
I was in the forest service for a summer after high-school. This covered the major topics pretty well. Ever see a 200 year old pine tree torch up after being exposed to a grass fire for 3 minuets? At 60 yards away the heat turned my face red and it looked like the gates of hell opening up right in front of me. Not to mention dodging exploding pinecones. As a polite girl....I could not stop cursing for half an hour.....my supervisor blamed my adrenalin rush. I still have one of the pinecones that exploded away from that tree!
Wow, I think this is Aranda's first > 5 Minute episode, correct me if I'm wrong, and he did a great job with it! Fire is such a beautiful, strange thing, isn't it? It's cool how much it affects and, in some cases, benefits forests.
Hey guys! I'd just like to make a short distinction here: Volatile gases are not the same thing as smoke. All you guys are saying about the volatile gases emitted by hot wood and how they are expelled is completely true, but this is one important distinction to make. What we "know as smoke" as you say, is simply an aerosol of liquid and solid particle, commonly soot, ash, various non-flammable or unignited liquids and so on, which rises off the wood because the gases and particles in the aerosol are hotter than surrounding air. It is of course true, though, that smoke does contain flammable vapours and gases. However, it's important to know the difference, because dry wood starts emitting volatile gases at temperatures as low as 100 degrees Celsius, but doesn't ignite until temperatures ranging from 280 to 500 degrees Celsius, depending on the circumstances, such as if there is a flame involved or if it spontaneously combusts. Various online sources give different estimates, and every type of wood is different(pine with its high resin content, densely packed cork, etc). Otherwise, great episode, and I love the show! Keep up the good work. :)
I've been studying fire science for 5 years now. This is the first time I've heard of gels being used to fight fire. I've always been told there were foams very similar to soap that reduce water tension and make the water penetrate the fuel better, and form an oxygen smothering blanket over the fuel.
Aric Castro Why aren't gels used more for structure fires? What is the point of pouring the water on, so that it runs off, while the fire still burns? Merely to cool the fire, so that it sort of stalls out eventually? Gels are sticky and stick all over the fuel, stopping it from burning. And I think more natural forest fires should be left to burn wild, to fizzle or grow naturally depending on how the weather is, out in remote unpopulated areas. Why pollute forests with costly fire retardants, that may make little difference anyway? Backburns seems rather pointless, if there is no human-dominated area to protect, areas from which the fire must be steered away from. Seems like backburns add even more burned acres to the fire, when it could have slowed or calmed down maybe on its own? Forest fires can too easily grow too large too quickly, to cost-effectively fight, and those that don't, often are no big deal and don't even make the news. BTW, could chem-trails and other idiotic government policies, be making natural forest fires, unnatural or making them worse? Government and mad-scientists always seem to be tampering with something, making it worse.
In Australia it's particularly nasty - all of the native flora are specifically designed to catch fire at the drop of a hat, burn very intensely, and yet still remain burning for a significant length of time.
I remember being on a road trip a few years ago, I was going through Oklahoma I believe and was driving through thick smoke that covered the highway. Then I realized there was a lot of fire burning in the wooded area just 20 feet off the road... wild fire sounds like a pretty simple concept to imagine, but it was very strange to actually see it right in front of me. Just something about it gave me a weird feeling
You could put out wildfires with low yield nuclear weapons. Detonate the warhead high enough that the thermal flash and fireball don't reach the ground, and the air blast will blow out the flames. The smallest American boosted fission warheads were actually pretty clean, the radiation well below safety limits after a few days. You could also use a thermobaric bomb, but those are larger and more expensive than small nukes.
Still wouldn't work. the explosion would remove the air for a short period of time. The fire would reignite once the air returned because the material would still be hot.
Don't quote me, but I would imagine that would be alot more expensive than our current methods just to build a nuclear bomb to detonate to wipe out a forest fires, not to mention convincing the local human population and media to allow it along with other complication like radiation, etc. Disclaimer: In no way am I insulting you. Actually I enjoy reading your unorthodox method. ^^
every time they say 90% of forest fires are caused by humans I wonder how much that was in prehistory because we've controlled fire for a while and it's possible that nature adapted to our carelessness with it
Bushfires in Australia are always particularly interesting (if that's the right word to use) in the speed they spread and how dangerous they can be. Eucalyptus trees make up a huge percentage of our forests, and contain a large amount of naturally occurring oils in their leaves, which evaporates on warmer days, giving them a bluish look from a distance. They're very volatile for this reason, and have been known to literally explode when ignited. Apparently BoM is predicting a bad year for it again this coming summer.
Some of the worst wild fires are soil based thanks to massive quantities of accumulated dead plant matter mixed in the topsoil. This is why smoke jumpers keep shoveling the topsoil down to subsoil when they form a fire line.
The 2009 Kinglake fire in Australia reached 1000 degrees Celsius and traveled at 40 km an hour. Due to a wind change it reached a 100km fire front (width)
The biggest problem with bushfires in Australia is the oil in eucalyptus leaves is exceptionally flammable so massive gum trees can flame up in only a couple of seconds.
controlled burning is an underutilized preventative measure simply due to the amount of labor it requires over vast areas and the nearly impossible conditions needed for optimum safety. Its used most often as a reactionary tool to fight fires rather than a conservation effort. More foresters and better conservation funding is needed if the US wants to really address the wildfire issue, otherwise that money is simply going to go into more firefighters and more disaster relief checks.
Last I knew the Oregon Forestry program still did them--they were actively recruiting back when I was in high school (came around the junior high schools and high schools trying to get kids interested in doing OSU's (Oregon State that is) program. Could not say with confidence if that is still the case or not.
"In an average year the Florida Forest Service will issue 120,000 authorizations allowing people and agencies to prescribe burn their land. An average of over 2 million acres are treated with prescribed fire each year."
Its good to see that all of you are all well informed in regards to your respective areas. I too have been involved with controlled burns, down in new mexico. However, i did not imply that they weren't used, but underused. Even if 2 million acres are maintained each year in a 40 million acre state, even smaller proportions are maintained in other states. With a landmass millions of square miles to deal with (that is the US Rocky Mt. and West Coast region) even 5% controlled is on a grand scale. With a close to 7 million annual average acres destroyed for this last decade i feel like the scale simply needs to be increased, not that we should start, because as you all know and have pointed out, we are already doing it.
Thanks for mentioning us Australians SciShow! Even the weather wants to kill you down here. No tree is safe either, we have a tree called the stinging tree (imaginative, I know) that is like poison ivy, except taken to Australian levels of painful/lethal effects. Its stings have been known to drive horses of cliffs because of the pain. It's not all bad though, some of the toxins in the plant are very promising for cancer research. Might I suggest a video on the medical significance of natural toxins, it's quite cool what we can do with the the deadly things that we find in nature.
He's gotten so much better since he started. I remember when he first appeared and I was like WHO IS THIS GUY? WHERES HANK? He spoke much more slowly than Hank and as a result the video came across kind of boring. In his most recent videos he's become a lot more fun to listen to! He's seemed to have taken in a bit of Hanks rhythm. I enjoyed this video.
Off-shore oil drills also use incendiary missiles to starve an oil platform fire of oxygen before it gets to destructive. Of course, it's also extremely dangerous, but so is letting an off-shore oil platform burn.
Yeah here in Canada I sometimes wonder how anything can be left in British Columbia because it seams to always be on fire. There was one year where a fire there was so big that it covered all of lower Canada in smoke. The days were dark and people tried staying indoors. If you had to go outside, you but on a mask.
Hmmmm, every comment I make to start conversations seems to go the wrong way. Never been much of a good conversation starter, maybe I should stop trying.
Phillip Unrau yes this world IS full of assholes.. and I hope god or nature will soon rid the world of evil and selfish people that dont care about others or nature.
+Phillip Unrau Dude....honestly.....People might take you a minute more seriously if you'd just format your posts so they are legible. Don't give me the "english isn't my first language" crap. You obviously know english. Your spelling, misuse and just blatant incorrect usage of punctuation, random capitalization, random comments, random....randomness....is just horrid. If you want to be taken seriously, please just format your posts so they are legible and clear. Else-wise I see what you wrote and immediately think you are trolling.
I hate to be pedantic, but this is a science channel. Heat in the thermodynamic meaning involves the transfer of energy, and has nothing to do with absolute temperature. I think you meant "thermal energy" or "temperature", not "heat".
Interesting. California's King fire (just about burnt 100,000 acres and is only 55% contained) is less than 20 miles from where I grew up so it's all over my facebook news feed. Nice relevant video :) At least there's something positive that comes from all of this.
That 90% - 10% statistic is nice, but that's counting individual fires, not area burned by those fires. The area statistics, last time I looked them up, put natural fires on top by a wide margin.
asdgashash Yeah. In 2008, humans were responsible for most of the burning (by area) in the US. For the rest of the decade 2001-10, lightning burned larger areas. Especially notable was 2004, where humans caused 83% of fires, but lightning burned 88% of the affected acreage.
It seems like happiness is right in front of you. If you love learning then happiness may be in you learning. You just may be better off learning with other people if thats the kind of happiness i think your talking about.
