Roughly 100 wildfires are raging out of control in Ontario, sending smoke streaming more than 1,000 miles from their origin.
in Canada is blanketing a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast this week, causing cities across the region to issue air quality warnings.. The increasing severity of wildfires across the continent—driven in part to climate change —means that even places where blazes aren’t burning will still suffer with the impacts.
More than 100 fires are burning out of control across Canada as of Wednesday, with hundreds more being monitored or battled. The smoke has drifted south and east, turning skies hazy from Minnesota to New York. Particularly dramatic images have emerged from Toronto, where commuters went to work on Wednesday morning under orange skies.
The region is also dealing with a heat wave, with temperatures well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas and an even higher heat index.in New York City topped out at 180, putting the city's air squarely in the “unhealthy” category as defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Other places were even worse off, with Duluth, Minnesota, seeing AQI top out above 500 .
Smoky conditions are expected to worsen in parts of the Northeast US on Thursday, including New York. The wildfire smoke blanketing the area contains microscopic particles of matter known as PM2.5—shorthand for particles that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers, or 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Exposure to PM2.5 can trigger or worsen a number of medical conditions, especially in vulnerable populations.
Nicholas Nassikas, a pulmonologist and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says that he would tell his patients with preexisting conditions, like asthma and lung diseases, to limit their time outside in such smoky conditions. Children “have a faster breathing rate—they just breathe more,” says Nassikas, while the elderly, who often have compounding conditions and may live in less well-ventilated homes and senior centers, are also at risk.
Jennifer Stowell, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, says that even healthy adults may want to take precautions on days when the air quality index goes over 100: “At the very least, it is important to limit your time outdoors to reduce your overall exposure. ” she says. If you have to be outside for long periods of time, Stowell recommends wearing an N95 mask.
Stowell, who is currently in Boston, where the AQI hit 110 on Wednesday, says that wasn’t planning on attending outdoors events until the evening. Dan Westervelt, an associate professor of climate physics at Columbia University, is similarly cautious.
“I’m going to make sure my kids are staying indoors today,” he says. “I won’t be doing any physical exertion, like running, today or tomorrow. ” Climate change is driving up temperatures. That’s making wildfire season longer and creating hotter, drier conditions that lead to more explosive fires.
Apublished last year estimated that wildfire smoke already causes 40,000 deaths per year in the US, and could more than double to 70,000 deaths per year by 2050 if warming continues. As bad air quality days from wildfire smoke get more common, the research on prolonged exposure to that smoke is still developing. A similar blast of smoke from Canadian wildfires hit the Northeast in 2023.
“Exposure to high levels of air pollution over the course of a lifetime or a long period of time is demonstrated numerous times in research to lead to premature mortality,” says Westervelt. “You can chop off some months of your life expectancy if you are living in conditions where you're very frequently regularly exposed to high levels of air pollution.
” PM2.5 can come from a number of different sources, including traffic and power plants, but wildfire smoke packs a different type of punch. As fires increasingly spread into towns, they can burn homes, cars, playgrounds, and other non-natural structures. That creates a toxic soup of smoke. And while masks like N95s help keep some particulate matter out of the body, they do not remove all the pollutants that may be found in wildfire smoke.
New York City has opened cooling centers to deal with the heat wave that’s been gripping the city and is handing out masks at some of these cooling centers. But masks don’t remove gaseous pollutants that can be found in wildfire smoke, and cooling centers may not be prioritizing running air purifiers. Though air conditioners can help with air quality, these centers “should also be havens for clean air,” Powell says.
After decades of work to clean up other sources of pollution in the US, the “big challenge,” Westervelt says, is now wildfire smoke.
“We’ve done a pretty good job as a nation of making vehicles more efficient, having more renewables, switching to cleaner fuels,” he says. “There could be more progress on that, but really, it’s mostly all about wildfire smoke. ”is a senior writer for WIRED, covering climate change, energy, and the environment. Previously, they were a reporter and editor at Drilled, an investigative climate multimedia reporting project.
Before that, they wrote about climate change and technology for Gizmodo, and served as a contributing editor for the New ... Long hours outdoors, day drinking, and World Cup matches are among the factors raising the risks of heat-related illness, as hot weather spreads across the eastern US.
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No, ReallyA new, AI-assisted model of insurance is quietly exploding in disaster-prone areas—and may be coming for FEMA too. Is it the answer to climate change, or a trap? Factors like the short interval between the two powerful quakes and different types of soil led to some structures collapsing while others stayed standing.
The country was hit hard by a pair of quakes that happened in quick succession and were likely driven by stress being transferred from one part of the fault that runs through the country to another. The maps and images show the extent of destruction and give rescue operations a tool to find any remaining survivors.
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