Scientists expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month.
A fire broke out near Sisimiut, Greenland’s second-largest town and popular tourist center, on June 14 and 15, and a second fire broke out in Kujarek, on the island’s southern tip, on June 17, satellite images showed.
Most of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory, is covered by vast ice sheets and thick glaciers, but much of it is ice-free and covered by tundra. Wildfires in these areas are rare but are becoming more common.
wildfires in greenland
But two fires at the beginning of summer are particularly unusual. Dr Mark Purrington, senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, said: “Vegetation fires in higher northern latitudes often occur in July and August.”
Sonya Dias, a scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Environmental Change Research Unit who conducted fieldwork in Greenland after the devastating wildfires in 2019, said that while the timing was not unprecedented, it felt “very wild” to see the island burning so early this year.
“Wet (conditions) and snow are detrimental to fire ignition and fire spread,” she said. “Conditions need to be warm and fairly dry.”
Sonya Dias (right) and Hermina Pirkama, a PhD student at the University of Helsinki, working in Greenland. Photo: Lucas Diaz
Inunguaq Eigir Lundblad, emergency manager for Kekata city, which includes Sisimiut, said the fire in the city “started after someone recklessly used fire. We didn’t have much snow this winter, and we haven’t had much rain since then, so the soil is very dry.”
Miki Šikemsen, the city’s emergency manager, said the immediate cause of the fire was not yet known, but added: “The weather conditions in the region have been unusually dry this year, with no significant rain since May, making the vegetation very dry and highly flammable.”
Associate Professor Pelle Teisner, an anthropologist at the University of Greenland, said drying soil “could lead to more fires.”
A study of fires in ice-free areas of western Greenland detected no fires from 1995 to 2007. Subsequently, 21 separate fires were recorded between 2008 and 2020, with major fires occurring in 2017 and 2019.
The wildfires that broke out along Greenland’s coast in August 2017 were among the deadliest in history. Photo: NASA
Climate change has caused the Arctic to heat up four times faster than the rest of the planet. Mr Parrington said it was “difficult” to understand why the fires started earlier than usual, but Copernicus data suggested temperatures were “extraordinarily high”, which may have made vegetation more flammable.
“But a fire still requires an ignition source,” he says.
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Fires that burn the peaty soils of the Arctic tundra can spew large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the planet’s heating and helping fires spread.
Although the Greenland fires are small by global standards, Diaz’s research shows they release far more carbon per square meter than any other tundra fires reported to date. The study, which is under peer review, also suggests that the carbon is ancient, having been trapped underground for hundreds to thousands of years.
Lucas Díaz, a Brazilian environmental engineer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam whose husband was also on the 2019 fire research trip, said he was first reminded of the TV show Game of Thrones when he saw an advertisement for a research position studying such fires in a project called Fires in the Land of Ice.
“The common image people have of Greenland is that it’s a land of ice. And while that’s true, most of Greenland is covered in ice. But there are also ice-free areas covered in tundra,” he says. “It could catch fire and burn.”
The researchers, who met during a field trip to study wildfires in Canada, traveled to Greenland in 2024 on a project funded by the Finnish Research Council to collect data on the country’s second-worst wildfire. The results are intended to inform global fire models that are not trained on Arctic fires.
Fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature are making fire weather more common and increasing global temperatures by 1.3 degrees Celsius. “That doesn’t mean the situation will get worse every year, there will be more and more fires every year,” Lucas Diaz said. “But what we’re seeing is an increase in the overall conditions that create a fire-prone environment.”
