Article from the Sacramento Bee, October 29, 2018
Wildfires tearing through the Western U.S. in recent years have burned whole communities to the ground, claimed countless lives and busted government firefighting budgets.
The destruction looks and feels unprecedented — and compared to the last several decades, today’s fires are extremely destructive and expansive, according to satellite data and other measures cited by Utah State University researchers.
But in a new study published by the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, those researchers argue that Western blazes today (even if they’re bigger than in the 1980s) are still consuming “a small fraction” of the land fires consumed before European settlers arrived en masse in the West.
Read the full article here: https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article220810830.html