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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

> Brigham, the study's lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled.

It's hard to believe those trees died in this fire. Tragic if true.

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https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-16/sequoia-...

And it's happening again as we speak.

I am no expert or anything, just want to mention that Sequoias need fire to grow. Their seeds usually survive fire and afterwards, new growth is triggered.

This does not mean that human-made fires are good. At this point, any additional release of CO2 is pretty bad.

Seems like all Californians know this fact. That's why it's so shocking that they perished in the fire.

Yes, absolutely.. loosing these giants is really sad.

Just motivated by the fact that there are people other than Californians on HN.

Adult trees also often survive fire; you can walk into any number of hollow, burned-out, still living trees.

Yes, but they are adapted to relatively frequent but lower intensity fires. As the article says, for the last century there was a policy of fire suppression, so the "undergrowth" (and from the perspective of a Sequoia, pretty much everything else is undergrowth) is much more dense than it usually was. So if a fire gets out of control, it may get more intense than the Sequoias are adapted to.

The article addresses that. This fire killed the trees.

It's highly unlikely that they died. Large sequoias are very very good at surviving fires. The fires don't reach a height that can damage them.

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