Climate change or arson? Wildfires rage across Greece's Chios Island
A massive wildfire has been raging on the Greek island of Chios since Saturday. The massive fire threatens residential areas, farmland, and the island's unique mastiha crops. The fire started as three separate blazes near Kofinas, Agia Anna, and Agios Makarios Vrontados, and has merged into a single, uncontrollable front, fuelled by strong winds. On Sunday, 190 firefighters, supported by 35 vehicles, 11 helicopters, and two water-dropping planes, are battling the blaze. These efforts are hampered by the windy conditions and steep rocky terrain.advertisementAt least 16 residential areas, including Dafnonas, Ververato, Karyes, and Agios Makarios, have been evacuated. Alerts were issued by Greece's 112 emergency system urging residents to flee to safer areas like Vrontados Beach or Chios town. Power outages have affected parts of the island, which are also complicating efforts to douse the fire.The fires have destroyed warehouses, damaged agricultural land, and raised concerns about olive and mastic trees, important to the local economy.SIMULTANEOUS FIRES FUEL ARSON SUSPICION
Apart from meteorological reasons, local authorities suspect arson as one of the possible causes, given the simultaneous outbreak of three fires. A specialist fire department arson investigation team has been deployed to the island to inquire into the angle. Greece's Minister of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection expressed concern over the 'suspicious' nature of the fires, noting 110 fires across the country in the last 48 hours.WHY GREECE'S CHIOS REGION IS SO VULNERABLE TO WILDFIRES?advertisementChios, located in the eastern Aegean, is prone to wildfires during Greece's hot, dry summers. Officials attribute the increasing frequency and intensity of such blazes to climate change. The island previously suffered catastrophic wildfire damage in 2016, which destroyed 90% of mastic trees in some areas. Greece had invested heavily in firefighting resources, hiring a record number of firefighters and acquiring modern equipment, but the ongoing fire season remains challenging.HOW IS CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSING WILDFIRES IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES?High temperatures are one of the reasons for wildfires. Chios, like much of Greece, has seen prolonged heatwaves, with summer temperatures often exceeding 40C, priming forests and mastic groves for ignition.Reduced rainfall and extended droughts are also one of major reasons for such fires. Greece experienced a 30% rainfall deficit in some regions creating tinderbox conditions. On Chios, parched soils and vegetation, including olive and mastic trees, fuel rapid fire spread.Climate-driven shifts in weather patterns intensify winds, like those fanning the Chios fires. Gusts up to 60 km/h have spread flames across steep, rocky terrain, overwhelming firefighting efforts.The situation remains critical, with no injuries reported so far, but the fires continue to threaten homes and livelihoods. Tourists, including British and Irish holidaymakers, have been warned, and some evacuations have affected popular areas near Chios town- Ends
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The Hindu
8 hours ago
- The Hindu
Swiss glaciers show holes reminiscent of cheese
Climate change appears to be making some of Switzerland's vaunted glaciers look like Swiss cheese: full of holes. Matthias Huss of the glacier monitoring group GLAMOS offered a glimpse of the Rhone Glacier, which feeds the eponymous river that flows through Switzerland and France to the Mediterranean, shared the observation with The Associated Press this month as he trekked up to the icy expanse for a first 'maintenance mission" of the summer to monitor its health. The state of Switzerland's glaciers came into stark and dramatic view of the international community last month when a mudslide from an Alpine mountain submerged the southwestern village of Blatten. The Birch Glacier on the mountain, which had been holding back a mass of rock near the peak, gave way — sending an avalanche into the valley village below. Experts say geological shifts and, to a lesser extent global warming, played a role. Fortunately, the village had been largely evacuated beforehand, but Swiss authorities said a 64-year-old man had gone missing after the incident. Late Tuesday, regional Valais police said they had found and were examining human remains of a person who died in the mudslide. The Alps and Switzerland — home to the most glaciers in any European country by far — have seen them retreat for about 170 years, but with ups and downs over time until the 1980s, he said. Since then, the decline has been steady, with 2022 and 2023 the worst of all. Last year was a 'bit better," he said. "Now, this year also doesn't look good, so we see we have a clear acceleration trend in the melting of glaciers,' said Huss, who also is a lecturer at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETHZ, said in beaming sunshine and with slushy ice dripping underfoot. The European Union's Copernicus climate center said last month was the second-warmest May on record worldwide, although temperatures in Europe were below the running average for that month compared to the average from 1991 to 2020. Europe is not alone. In a report on Asia's climate released Monday, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said reduced winter snowfall and extreme summer heat last year 'were punishing for glaciers' — with 23 out of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and the Tian Shan range suffering 'mass loss' in 2024. A healthy glacier is considered "dynamic," by generating new ice as snow falls on it at higher elevations while melting at lower altitudes: The losses in mass at lower levels are compensated by gains above. As a warming climate pushes up the melting to higher altitudes, such flows will slow down or even stop altogether and the glacier will essentially become 'an ice patch that is just lying there,' Huss said. 'This is a situation we are seeing more and more often on our glaciers: That the ice is just not dynamic anymore," he said. "It's just resting there and melting down in place.' This lack of dynamic regeneration is the most likely process behind the emergence and persistence of holes, seemingly caused by water turbulence at the bottom of the glacier or air flows through the gaps that appear inside the blocks of ice, Huss said. 'First the holes appear in the middle, and then they grow and grow, and suddenly the roof of these holes is starting to collapse," he said. "Then these holes get visible from the surface. These holes weren't known so well a few years ago, but now we are seeing them more often.' Such an affected glacier, he said, "is a Swiss cheese that is getting more holes everywhere, and these holes are collapsing — and it's not good for the glacier.' Richard Alley, a geosciences professor and glaciologist at Penn State University, noted that glacier shrinkage has wide impacts on agriculture, fisheries, drinking water levels, and border tensions when it comes to cross-boundary rivers. 'Biggest worries with mountain glaciers may be water issues — now, the shrinking glaciers are supporting summertime (often the dry season) flows that are anomalously higher than normal, but this will be replaced as glaciers disappear with anomalously low flows,' he said in an email. For Switzerland, another possible casualty is electricity: The Alpine country gets the vast majority of its power through hydroelectric plants driven from its lakes and rivers, and wide-scale glacier melt could jeopardize that. With a whirr of a spiral drill, Huss sends ice chips flying as he bores a hole into the glacier. Then with an assistant, he unfurls a jointed metal pole — similar to the basic glacier-monitoring technology that has existed for decades — and clicks it together to drive it deep down. This serves as a measuring stick for glacier depth. 'We have a network of stakes that are drilled into the ice where we determine the melting of the mass loss of the glacier from year to year,' he said. 'When the glacier will be melting, which is at the moment a speed of about 5 to 10 centimeters (2-4 inches) a day, this pole will re-emerge.' Reaching up over his head — about 2.5 meters (8 feet) — he points out the height of a stake that had been drilled in in September, suggesting that an ice mass had shrunk by that much. In the super-hot year of 2022, nearly 10 meters of vertical ice were lost in a single year, he said. The planet is already running up against the target cap increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperatures set in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015. The concerns about global warming that led to that deal have lately been overshadowed by trade wars, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and other geopolitical issues. 'If we manage to reduce or limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, we couldn't save this glacier,' Huss said, acknowledging many Swiss glaciers are set to disappear in the future. As a person, Huss feels emotion. As a glaciologist, he is awestruck by the speed of change. 'It's always hard for me to see these glaciers melting, to even see them disappearing completely. Some of my monitoring sites I've been going to for 20 years have completely vanished in the last years," he said. 'It was very sad — if you just exchange this beautiful, shiny white with these brittle rocks that are lying around.' 'But on the other hand,' he added, "it's also a very interesting time as a scientist to be witness to these very fast changes.'
Time of India
18 hours ago
- Time of India
Britain on the boil
A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE With its summer weather taken from other places, Britain blows hot and cold It is the end of June and it has to be hot in Gurgaon, where I live. The problem is that I'm not in Gurgaon, but in London, and the temperature today is going to be 34°C, making it hotter than Gurgaon with its pre-monsoon showers. Britain has long been in climate change denial of its own climate. It persists in thinking of itself as a cold country. And it is a cold country for most of the year. But then, all of a sudden, the sun will burst through the grey skies, temperatures will soar, and the tabloid headlines will go into a frenzy about how it's going to be hotter than Spain, and the south of France, and Sicily. And the nanny state will exhort people to carry water with them, and get off the bus, or the Tube if they feel faint, and everyone who's been moaning and grumbling about the wet and cold, will now moan and grumble about the horrid heat. It happens every year, regular as a Swiss clock. But by common consensus, Britain believes itself to be a cold country or at least a temperate one. Hot? No fear, not us. We don't do heat. So when the heat wave does strike, everyone's caught unprepared. Homes don't have ceiling fans. Bars, restaurants, and most public transport lack air conditioning. And people get bowled over as much by astonishment as by the heat, like ninepins in a game of skittles. Britain's denial of being a hot country, even temporarily, is both understandable and factually correct. Britain is not a hot country; the extreme heat waves it regularly endures are all borrowed from foreign shores. What the weather reports describe as a 'plume of hot air' will come whooshing in from North Africa, or some such outlandish place, and smite the country with sunstroke. Britain's borrowed heat from distant climes is analogous to the wealth it euphemistically borrowed in a fit of absent-mindedness from its former colonies and forgot to return. British heat? 'Course not. It's only borrowed. Like the Kohinoor. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
IND vs ENG Test, Leeds weather report: Rain expected to make its presence felt; latest from Headingley
Rain threatens to disrupt the thrilling final day of the first Test match between India and England at Headingley, where England needs 350 runs more to win with all 10 wickets intact. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The weather forecast indicates an 84 percent chance of rainfall on Tuesday, according to Accuweather, potentially impacting what promises to be a decisive day of cricket. England face a challenging target of 371 runs, attempting to achieve the highest successful chase in a 5-day Test match at this ground. The current record for the highest chase at Headingley stands at 404 runs, achieved in a 6-day Test match between Australia and England, led by Don Bradman's team. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. The Leeds weather report suggests a cold and windy day with wind speeds reaching up to 55 kmph. The conditions are expected to remain predominantly cloudy throughout the day, with intermittent sunshine making batting potentially challenging. IND vs ENG 1st Test: KL Rahul's grit, Rishabh Pant's fire keep India alive The rain is forecasted to begin before the start of play, with conditions expected to improve around 11 AM local time. However, another spell of rain is anticipated around 2 PM, which could affect the lunch session. The local weather department though predicts 60 percent chance of rain when play is scheduled to begin at 11am. That expectation persists until 2pm when it drops to 45 percent before picking up once again at 4pm. Things are expected to dry up thereafter but given the fickle nature of the British weather, it is tough to say. Leeds woke up to a cloudy sky with temperature dropping and chances of rain ahead of Day 5 of first India vs England Test. (Image: Sahil Malhotra/TOI Sports) The Headingley pitch has maintained its character over the first four days of play. The surface shows developing rough patches that could benefit spinners. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The overhead conditions have significantly influenced the pitch behaviour, with Day 4 demonstrating considerable movement due to overcast conditions. India will rely on Jasprit Bumrah's bowling prowess to make early inroads. Shubman Gill's team must capitalise on their opportunities, unlike their performance in the first innings of this Test match. Both teams have expressed their intent to pursue a result, despite the weather challenges. The match situation mirrors England's historic chase against Australia in 2019, where they successfully pursued 359 runs, featuring a memorable innings from Ben Stokes.
