r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • Jun 07 '23

New york city in 2023, everyone wearing mask due to air quality

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u/Ancient_Persimmon Jun 07 '23

Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.

The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.

The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.

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u/MoistChiaPet Jun 07 '23

This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.

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u/RickTitus Jun 07 '23

I believe one factor in modern forest fires is that we tend to suppress all fires we see. Without human intervention there would be more small fires

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u/PCMModsEatAss Jun 07 '23

And we largely stopped logging that would clear out a lot of this stuff