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How to Kill a Zombie Fire
How to Kill a Zombie Fire - Underground peat fires are bedeviling: They refuse to die, even when flooded with water. Could this new weapon put them down for good?
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HUMANITY’S GOT A FULL-TILT ZOMBIE outbreak on its hands. As the world warms and certain regions—particularly the Arctic—dry, so does the super fuel known as peat. It’s basically concentrated carbon from dead plants, and it burns not at all like your typical Californian or Australian wildfire. Instead of sending towering flames upward, a peat fire burns in the opposite direction, smoldering deep in the soil. Firefighters often soak the ground with water and declare victory, only for the soil to reignite a surface fire months later. The land might even snow over while the smoldering persists undetected. That’s why scientists dub these menaces “zombie fires.”
Yet researchers have found a weapon that could help put down a zombie fire for good—the equivalent of destroying its brain instead of just mangling its body. “Smoldering is the most persistent type of combustion on earth, because it’s really easy to start and very difficult to stop,” says Imperial College London engineer Guillermo Rein, co-author of a new paper describing the work in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. “They call them zombie fires, but the equivalent would be like an army of zombies. They are very, very difficult to suppress.”
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...und-peat-fires
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