Nearly 40 percent of Rim Fire land a moonscape

    A fire that raged in forest land in and around Yosemite National Park has left a barren moonscape in the Sierra Nevada mountains that experts say is larger than any burned there in centuries.
    The fire has consumed about 400 square miles, and within that footprint are a solid 60 square miles that burned so intensely that everything is dead, researchers said.
     “In other words, it’s nuked,” said Jay Miller, senior wildland fire ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “If you asked most of the fire ecologists working in the Sierra Nevada, they would call this unprecedented.”
Smaller pockets inside the fire’s footprint also burned hot enough to wipe out trees and other vegetation.
In total, Miller estimates that almost 40 percent of the area inside the fire’s boundary is nothing but charred land. Other areas that burned left trees scarred but alive...
    Miller says a fire has not left such a contiguous moonscape in the Sierra since before the Little Ice Age, which began in 1350.
     In the decades before humans began controlling fire in forests, the Sierra would burn every 10 to 20 years, clearing understory growth on the ground and opening up clearings for new tree growth. Modern-day practices of fire suppression, combined with cutbacks in forest service budgets and a desire to reduce smoke impacts in the polluted San Joaquin Valley, have combined to create tinderboxes, experts say.
Drought, and dryness associated with a warming climate also have contributed to the intensity of fires this year, researchers say...
    Some areas of the Stanislaus National Forest ravaged by the Rim Fire had not burned in 100 years. Most of the land that now resembles a moonscape burned on Aug. 21 and Aug. 22, when the fire jumped to canopies and was spreading the fastest...
    The Rim Fire started Aug. 17, when a hunter’s fire spread, and continues to burn. It is named for a ridge near the location where the fire started — The Rim of the World, an overlook above a gorge carved by the Tuolumne River. The area that burned in 1987 and again in 1996 was filled with chaparral.By the time the Rim Fire ripped through the canyon, it developed its own weather system that pushed it to consume up to 50,000 acres in a day...
    While the landscape has been ravaged, the soil that determines the amount of post-fire erosion that might occur when winter storms hit didn’t suffer as badly as scientists feared.Severe soil damage occurred on just 7 percent of the land inside the fire’s footprint, said officials with the federal Burned Area Environmental Response team. Fire can destroy soil and make it susceptible to erosion by either burning the fine roots and other organic matter that holds it together, or by burning chaparral that releases oils that create an impervious barrier preventing rainwater from being absorbed.

You no longer have to work at NASA to see a moonscape...the enviros and the federal land management agencies can give you a tour right here on mother earth...just gallop on down to Gaia Gulch.

Unfortunately, if current legislation and management practices are unchanged, we'll have a Gaia Gallery all around us.

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