National Geographic has an interesting article this week on a new NASA study documenting increases in forest fires caused by lightning strikes in the boreal forest in the northern parts of North America. The article says that “Since 1975, the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent, driven by an increase in volatile thunderstorm weather, according to a new NASA study published Monday in Nature Climate Change.”

This is particularly important because black soot from these fires is spreading across Greenland, encouraging the melting of the ice sheet there, according to a separate article this week in the Washington Post here. This could speed up the rise in sea level due to the loss of land-based ice.

Source: Commons Wikimedia