The Scary Science of Maui’s Wildfires
In an eerie echo of 2018’s Camp Fire, which sped through the town of Paradise, California, destroying 19,000 buildings and killing 85 people, ferocious wildfires are tearing through Maui, forcing some people to flee into the ocean. In places where fire is a natural part of the landscape, like California, wildfires now burn with ever greater ferocity, oftentimes spawning their own towering thunderclouds made of smoke, or obliterating ecosystems instead of resetting them for new growth. We have bad fire, period.” In the immediate term, what’s driving Maui’s fires is what makes wildfires so deadly anywhere in the world: wind. “Those fire-prone invasive species fill in any gaps anywhere else—roadsides, in between communities, in between people’s homes, all over the place,” says Pickett.
Extreme Wildfires Have Doubled in Frequency and Intensity in the Past 20 Years
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