What Causes A Forest Fire? Nature? No, Most Of The Times Humans Are Responsible For That

For most of the people, a forest fire is still an enigma, something that they have only seen on TV or read in the news.

So, it is not surprising that not many people know about it, including what causes a wildfire. A good section of the population thinks that wildfires like what is now burning down the Amazon rainforest in Brazil are a natural phenomenon.

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Nothing could be farther from the truth. While there is no doubt that wildfires do occur due to natural causes like lightning, the majority of the cases which are reported in India and around the world are man-made, deliberate or by accident.

Scientists say that forest fires are as old as the forests themselves and big and small outbreaks have always been part of the entire ecosystem.

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Most of these happen in the peak summers when a lot of trees and grass dry up. Incidents like lightning or the friction from dry branches rubbing against each other can ignite a fire. This then gets flamed by the winds and spreads over a vast area burning everything in its path.

However, it accounts for only a small number of the wildfires reported and often these die out fast.

But if you look closely over the years wildfires have become rampant and deadlier. That is because it was intended to be so.

With the population rapidly increasing there is an ever-increasing demand for food production. But as the land under agriculture has been stretched to the maximum and even the best agriculture techniques can only increase the yield so much the only option left is to clear the forests and begin farming there.

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The easiest, cheapest and the most effective way to clear the most amount of forest cover is to set it on fire. This has been happening across India for years now ad by each passing year it is only increasing.

Another reason farmers living near the forests begin a fire is to obtain good grazing grass as well as to facilitate the gathering of some forest products, fuelwood, timber, etc which they then sell. Such fires also help the farmers by keeping wild animals like tigers and leopards away from their livestock. But it can also turn into a giant inferno like what happened in Bandipur National Park in Karnataka earlier this year. The fire which was set by some farmers to chase away the tigers ended up burning thousands of hectares of dense forest.

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Another major reason for the outbreak of forest fires is carelessness, often from the part tourists and trekkers.

A discarded cigarette butt or lit match stick can cause damages beyond imagination and there have been documented cases where wildfires have been caused by such mindless acts. Adventure seekers who go on trekking expeditions into deep forests and camp there in the night, sleeping next to 'campfires' have also known to have caused forest fires.

Another human-caused forest fire is from the sparks on electricity lines passing through the forests. An accidental spark on such high tension lines could set fire to the dry grass and leaves which can then turn into a huge blaze.

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In general, forest fires have been classified into two - Surface Fire and Crown Fire.

Surface Fire

A forest fire may burn primarily as a surface fire, spreading along the ground as the surface litter (senescent leaves and twigs and dry grasses, etc) on the forest floor and is engulfed by the spreading flames.

Crown Fire

The other type of forest fire is a crown fire in which the crown of trees and shrubs burn, often sustained by a surface fire. A crown fire is particularly very dangerous in a coniferous forest because resinous material given off burning logs burn furiously. On hill slopes, if the fire starts downhill, it spreads up fast as heated air adjacent to a slope tends to flow up the slope spreading flames along with it. If the fire starts uphill, there is less likelihood of it spreading downwards.

All in all if humans are solely responsible for this kind of destruction, they are the ones who should take immediate steps to stop it. Merely wondering about this phenomenon is not going t help in the long run.