Peat fires are earthly menaces. They can burn for months at a time and release 100 times the carbon that a wildfire does. Fortunately, researchers say they have found a weapon that could help put them out. (From 2021)
wildfire. Instead of sending towering flames upward, a peat fire burns in the opposite direction, smoldering deep in the soil. Oftentimes, firefighters will 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 say they have now 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, coauthor on a new.
Using a small, custom-built “peat reactor,” which was stuffed with the plant material and lined with ceramic insulators, they could set a zombie fire and monitor it as it burned. Above the box they situated a nozzle to spray either regular water or their special blend on different fires. Compared to the same amount of plain water, the water with surfactant cut the time needed to extinguish the blaze by 40 percent.
That’s promising, because the less time a peat fire has to burn, the less land it will destroy and the fewer emissions it will spew.
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