Scientists alarmed after two wildfires hit Greenland within a week

Scientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week of each other on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month.

Fires were burning close to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second largest town and a popular tourism centre, on 14 and 15 June, satellite imagery has shown, while a second blaze hit Kujalleq, on the island’s southern tip, on 17 June.

While most of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory, is covered in vast ice sheets and thick glaciers, a significant part is ice-free and covered in tundra. Wildfires in these areas are rare, but becoming more common.

For two fires to break out this early in the summer, however, is particularly unusual. “Vegetation fires at high northern latitudes are more usual in July and August,” said Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Sonja Diaz, a scientist at the Environmental Change Research Unit of the University of Helsinki, who conducted field research in Greenland after a major wildfire in 2019, said the timing was not unheard of but that it felt “quite wild” to see the island burning so early in the year.

“Wet [conditions] and snow do not favour fire ignition and spread,” she said. “The conditions need to be warm and dry enough.”

Inunnguaq Eigil Lundblad, the emergency manager for Qeqqata municipality, which includes Sisimiut, said the fires there had broken out after “someone used fire recklessly. We had not had much snow this winter and then very little rainfall, which is why we have very dry soil.”

Miki Sikemsen, the emergency manager for Kujalleq municipality, said the immediate trigger for the fire there was not yet known, but added: “Weather conditions in the area have been unusually dry this year and we have not experienced any significant rainfall since May, which has left the vegetation very dry and highly flammable.”

The anthropologist Pelle Tejsner, an associate professor at the University of Greenland, said the dryness of the soil meant “more fires could be expected”.

A study of fires in ice-free regions of western Greenland did not detect any blazes from 1995 to 2007. It then recorded 21 separate events between 2008 and 2020, with major fires in 2017 and 2019.

Climate breakdown has heated the Arctic four times faster than the rest of the planet. Parrington said it was “challenging” to determine why the latest fires had occurred earlier than usual but that Copernicus data showed “anomalously high” air temperatures that could make vegetation more flammable.

“But the fires still need an ignition source,” he said.

Fires that burn peaty soil in Arctic tundra can spew large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, hastening the heating of the planet that helps fires spread.

Though Greenland wildfires are small by global standards, Diaz’s research suggests the carbon released per square metre is much higher than previously reported for other tundra fires. The research, which is under peer review, also suggests the carbon is old, having been locked in the ground for hundreds to thousands of years.

Her husband, Lucas Diaz, a Brazilian environmental engineer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who was also part of the trip to study the 2019 fires, said he first thought of the TV show Game of Thrones when he saw an advert for a research position studying such blazes in a project called “fire in the land of ice”.

“The general image that people have of Greenland is that it’s the land of ice – and that’s true, most of Greenland is covered by ice – but there are ice-free regions covered by tundra,” he said. “They can be ignited and burned.”

The researchers, who met on a field trip to study Canadian wildfires, went to Greenland in 2024 on a project funded by the Research Council of Finland to gather data from the country’s second-worst wildfire. The results are intended to inform global fire models, which are not trained on Arctic fires.

Fire weather is growing more common owing to fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature, which has heated the planet by 1.3C. “That does not mean every year it will get worse and we’ll have more and more and more fires every year,” said Lucas Diaz. “But what we see is that the overall conditions that create a fire-prone environment are increasing.”