Well the title is the question.
With ‘split’ I mean create some space between blocks where fire has nothing to travel to the next block to spread.
I imagine that actions like dropping water with helicopters would also be unnecessary since we could ‘give up’ a burning block and then the fire would be over.
Or am I too naive about it?
In: Earth Science
If you walk through a forest for an hour and realize that you’ve seen a few acres out of 100’s of millions, you’ll begin to see how impossible it would be to even manage a single National Forest much less a state like California or Idaho. Besides, burn is necessary for forests. We just happen to place ourselves in danger.
Here in Colorado the answer is $$$. Not profitable to send people out to do the work and timber has no value
Everyone has already mentioned fire breaks, but there is a little bit more too it. Even something as seemingly simple as a small gap in the forest often needs to be heavily assessed to ensure it isn’t damaging to protected species. Habitat fragmentation can cause a lot of issues, especially for large predators, and chopping up a forest could potentially do a lot more harm for what lives there than we expect.
Others have made good points that maintaining such a network of fire breaks would be expensive and resource-intensive.
Dividing forest habitat like this also creates what are known as *edge effects*, which can be ecologically devastating for some species. Many large animal and tree species require large tracts of dense forest to thrive. These forest edges create small, but potentially critical differences in climate and environment that can be detrimental to those “deep forest” species: for example, light, wind, and temperature can enter the forest horizontally, new species can establish themselves along the new edges and start to encroach into the forest and outcompete established species, and the breaks can hinder migration throughout the forest.
Lastly, fire is quite a beneficial process in many of Earth’s ecosystems. Humans have managed landscapes in a healthy way via fire for millennia. Over the last couple centuries, imported colonial forest management theories have called for an unhealthy level of fire suppression. As a result, fires in recent decades have been far more intense than they have been historically. Additionally, drought events are occurring with greater frequency, causing more frequent and intense fires than probably occurred historically, at least in North America.
It’s also worth mentioning that, especially in pine forests, fire is part of the natural cycle. Many pine species’ pine cones won’t open and seed until there is a fire, helping ensure that the new growth won’t have a bunch of trees blocking the sun. If I remember correctly, part of the reason the 1988 Yellowstone fire was so bad (in addition to the drought that year) was because we had been too effective in putting out fires, meaning there was a lot of unmanaged undergrowth and dead tress, and not a lot of younger, healthier trees. once a fire got going, it took off. To this day, Montana and Wyoming forest service follow strict guidelines about which fires to fight and which to let burn.
Every small patch you make from a large patch of forest creates more edges. Edges of vegetation patches tend to have more light, weeds and invasive species, which can compete with local native plants and animals (research “edge effects” and “habitat fragmentation”). However, you can have a large patch of forest that is periodically burned in small patches (mosaic burning) over time to reduce fuel loads and allow access to intact forest adjacent for movement of animals.
My brother was a “hotshot” who fought forest fires. I asked him how is it that green trees burn so easily? He said the heat from a forest fire is so intense, it dries out the everything as it approaches. He said the fire super-heats the sap inside the trees and the trees just explode all around you. He also said the noise from a fire is so loud that it’s like standing next to an old train tracks when a noisy train passes.
His unit was ‘burned over’ twice. They had to quickly dig holes and place a kind of tin foil over themselves and let the fire pass over them. He ended up hurting his back in a helicopter accident and has had 12 surgeries (he now has full use of his limbs).
You’ve actually accidentally invented a really commonly used fire prevention/mitigation technique call fire breaks. Trouble is, they do nearly nothing if there’s wind and generally large fires only get large because there’s wind.
Yes, OP, a little naive.
Wildfires do not happen only when there’s no wind, lot’s of humidty and in non-drought years. Even if there’s no wind at the start, fires create their own wind. This is found in the “chimney effect” where a fire is burning in a canyon, it is sucking in so much oxygen that a wind is created going into the canyon and all of it shoots out the top which gives us those smoke clouds that look like volcanoes.
When that happens, large debris gets easily sucked up and is sent up. If it doesn’t burn itself up, a smoldering leaf or weed could float down hundreds of feet away igniting a new wildfire.
The really big fires can easily jump hundreds of feet if a strong wind is blowing, becoming blowtorches of embers setting off fires across a firebreak.
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