Kolyma highway in Yakutia, also known as the Road of Bones, is on fire | Hacker News Reader

Kolyma highway in Yakutia, also known as the Road of Bones, is on fire

siberiantimes.com

83 pointsdredmorbius38 comments

With recent news of heat and wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, I'd looked using the Nullschool Earth weather visualiser for similar signs elsewhere. The submitted article is one of the few mentions of this year's Siberian forest fires I can find. (The fires have become something of an annual occurrence.)

The Yakutia region of Siberia is under a staggering amount of wildfire. The fires seem to have been burning since May, though by both particulate and CO channels at Nullschool, have exploded in size and intensity in just the past 48 hours or so (that would be after the dateline of this article).

Several videos on the article show conditions on the ground.

I'm linking two snapshots of current conditions as noted by Nullschool, showing smoke and more specific combustion channels.

Particulate channel, shows the location generally of smoke. I’ve selected the PM1 rather than PM2.5 channel as the latter is somewhat noisier, though it’s generally what’s used for smoke tracking. Both are fine particulate matter.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/07/02/2200Z/particulates/...

CO channel, where carbon monoxide is a much more specific indication of where there is current combustion. These signal regions themselves are immense. My eyeball estimate is that the fires cover a region roughly the size of the state of Oregon.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/07/02/2200Z/chem/surface/...

It's possible to select SO2 and NO2 channels as well, both of which also tend to indicate current combustion, though with specificity intermediate between CO and PM1.

The region on Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@61.9357692,135.147793,8z/data=!...

That's a really cool visualization, had never heard of nullschool before.

Windy has similar data (this is from Copernicus).

It's been around for a few years, is a really powerful and useful tool, and has all kinds of features to explore.

Click on the "Earth" button for the controls.

- You can switch between "Air", "Ocean", "Chem", "Particulates", "Space", and "Bio" classifications.

- Each has numerous characteristics or channels.

- "About" has a really good primer on what's being measured and how.

- You can toggle a number of settings, including the resolution ("HD" for "high definition"). If you've got a large-screen mobile device, toggle Desktop view as well in your browser.

- The calendar/date selector allows going through history, as well as up to about 7 days future forecast for some channels.

- Numerous map projections as well.

Please consider posting this as a blog post, really well put together.

That's actually kind of where this HN submission started ;-)

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/ee494920bdb301395e2d002590d8e...

Massive siberian forests fires became a regular thing about ten years ago. There is a strong suggestion that artificial fires used to cover up large-scale illegal logging. Russia hangs around the top of deforestation charts for quite a few years now.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not clear how a fire would cover up a logging operation (signs of logging machinery don't just disappear). Unless there were massive corruption - which I wouldn't be surprised, but would still be saddened if this turned out to be true.

But if you have massive corruption, do you really need the fires?

Russia has a judiciary. It can be a little random, but parts of it are good. This is definitely a country where you can bribe an official, do something illegal and then later find yourself in a courtroom with a judge who won't be bribed.

> roughly the size of the state of Oregon

That's huge! Right? How big are the biggest fires? Is there someone keeping track of all these extreme events, like we track hurricanes and storms?

Oregon is 98,466 mi². In comparison, the wildfires in Oregon last year that covered half the state in smoke for weeks were about 2,000 mi².

Yup that's massive. According to [1] the biggest fires in the US were the 2014 Northwest Territories fires which burned 8 million acres or ~12,500 square miles. 98,466 sq mi is more area than all of the wildfires in the United States going back to 2007 COMBINED.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires

That's not in the US. The Northwest Territories are in Canada. The largest fire in the US on that list is the 2020 California wildfire at ~6,900 square miles.

Note that there's the actual burnt region, and the region affected by the fire.

I'm referring to the latter, where for a region ~500 km / 300 mi on a side, there's an overwhelming amount of fire.

There's remarkably little news coverage of this, though the Siberian Times has run a few over the past several weeks. Again, the past few days' development has been immense.

For comparison, here's the CO channel from Nullschool for 11 September 2020, near the peak of the 2020 western US wildfire season.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2020/09/11/2100Z/chem/surface/...

That's the time when San Francisco's skies resembled Blade Runner:

https://nerdist.com/article/drone-video-bay-area-fires-blade...

A global pandemic, heat domes, towns in Canada blowing up in smoke, persistent wildfires in Yakutia (where temperatures can drop to −70C (−94F) in the winter)... it all seems to belong in a mediocre, over-the-top disaster movie... and yet, it's our reality.

The Gulf of Mexico is also on fire due to a pipeline leak https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1411075158006284290! Don't worry though, the predicted hurricane doesn't look like its path intersects with the fire.

If it did, it would probably disperse untold amounts of crude oil, an environmental disaster. But would it have put out the fire, I wonder.

Will a storm pull leaked oil from the sea?

Oil spills and leaks tend to dissipate eventually via several mechanisms. A storm will generally assist in dispersal. Given that it's the concentration of oil that is most harmful to life in the region, this is generally helpful.

Spilled oil consists of volatile and heavy elements. The volatile elements tend to evaporate, the heavy fractions eventually sink to the sea floor. (They can of course cause further damage there, as benthic damage resulting from the Deepwater Horizons spill attests.) Surface oil may also burn (as seems to be occurring here.) Some 20--40% of the mass of a slick may evaporate into the atmosphere. Some of the oil is water-soluble and will mix with the water column at depth, while 10--30% falls to or mixes with sediments on the seafloor.

Oil can also be washed onto shorlines --- beaches and rocks. Here it will mix with or coat sand and rocks. This is highly visible, but usually only a small fraction of the total spill volume. Wildlife, particularly birds, tend to be strongly and visibly affected.

At the surface, oil forms a slick. Wind and wave action tend to spread and disperse this, mixing the oil with the water column. Lighter fractions will eventually rise.

Managed responses to oil spills include skimming (booms and absorbants), burning (of concentrated oil), and dispersion (of widely-distributed oil). Skimming and burning where possible do remove the oil from the water column relatively quickly. The record on dispersants, which tend to be chemical-based agents themselves affecting sea life in the area, is more mixed. None of these methods are applicable to tropical-storm (or worse) conditions. Note that the spill in question here is far out of any possible track of Hurricane Elsa.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/how-do-oil...

https://scienceofhealthy.com/bioremediation-of-oil-spills/

The consensus between experts is that it will create a fire hurricane.

And carry sharks.

Sharknado VII: Sharkurricane!

Nothing surprises me anymore (I hope).

just what i need for my climate catastrophe anxiety...

question: is it better for the oil to burn up? i'm sure not all of it makes it to the surface, but maybe better than dispersing in the water where we'd never get it out?

I don't think anyone can answer that question based on first principles. It looks like the perfect conditions for incomplete combustion with aerosolized petroleum violently mixing with sea water that's getting rapidly pushed away by the force of the explosion.

On on the one hand, it might spread out the petroleum and prevent an oil slick from forming, making it less ecologically damaging. On the other hand, it might be combusting a negligible amount of the fuel and spreading the rest as tiny particles that aren't small enough to overcome a turbulent sea and collect at the surface, so they enter the respiratory and digestive systems of everything in the gulf.

In general, yes, as this rapidly removes much of the oil from the water column. The results of combustion are CO2 and water, as well as soot and partially-burned hydrocarbons. The amount of light elements on the surface and mixed into the water column are reduced, though there may still be substantial seafloor contamination from heavier components or partially-combusted material which sinks.

From the videos I've seen, I'd suspect a fair amount of natural gas in the leak, which is typical of at least some oil fields in the area. More so near Trinidad and Tobago, which is not exactly close to the field in question.

And further reading: the leak is in fact natural gas, so oil / liquids are likely a small fraction of the release.

Yeah it looks like lava e.g. gas....

I've also read back with the last giant spill that the chemicals they use to 'clean up' really just break the oil down into smaller droplets so it falls to the floor. if that's true it almost sounds worse like micro plastics.

OT: There was a "Nature" two part series about horses [1] and they talked about Yakutian horses [2], native to that region.

Yakutia gets impressively cold in winter, but it is no slouch in summer, either. It normally gets up to 38℃ (100℉). Those horses take both the summer heat and the winter cold outdoors, unsheltered. That's a 108℃ (194℉) range they handle.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/equus-story-of-the-horse-abo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse

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