Wood ignites at temperatures in the hundreds of degrees. How are some wildfires supposedly started by sunlight without human action or lightning?
In: 1508
The sun only fires don’t start on the trees.
But they do/can start on the underbrush. The conditions that have shown to reproduce it, are a very dry pine needle layer of 6+ inches. Where the bottom layers are breaking down.
Then a rainy day or so in the hot summer. That dryes quickly, but the water activates the decomposition in the underlayers, which is an exothermic reaction. With the right winds and the right heat the next day (90+)and a low humidity to remove all the rain from air. The pine needles can spontaneously combust, and they burn fast and hot. And they catch down branches that are dry, and then the trees eventually burn.
It’s very rare, but has been seen and reproduced.
Lightning is much more common
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