Where there’s smoke, there’s not necessarily fire.
Where there’s smoke, there’s not necessarily fire.
Wildfire smoke, sometimes drifting from hundreds of miles away, touched nearly every lake in North America for at least one day per year from 2019 to 2021, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
Even more significantly, the study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, found that 89% of the lakes in North America experienced smoke for more than 30 days during each of those three years of intense wildfire activity.
“That was surprising, even to us,” said lead author Mary Jade Farruggia, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Davis Graduate Group in Ecology and the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “With this study, we quantified for the first time the scope of the smoke problem. We show that it’s not just a widespread problem, but one that is long-lasting in a lot of places.”
Read more at: University of California - Davis
A smoke plume encroaches above Heart Lake in California's Siskiyou County. A UC Davis study shows wildfire smoke in recent years drifted across the continent, touching nearly every lake in North America. (Photo Credit: Erin Suenaga, UNR)
