This is Scientific American’s 60 Second Science. I’m Emily Schwing.Oil and water. Apples and oranges. Fire and Ice…None of these things really seem like they have much to do with one another…or do they?We found that more fire-favorable weather associated with declines in the Arctic sea ice during summer can increase autumn wildfires over the western United States.Hailong Wang is an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state.So we analyzed a few decades of observations wildfire incidents, sea ice cover and weather conditions to identify a relationship between Arctic sea ice decline and the wildfire risks.We called it a teleconnection.Wang says this idea of a fire and ice teleconnection… It’s not new.It’s a lot like the so-called “butterfly effect” - a term coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960’s to explain chaos theory.The idea can be summarized like this: if a butterfly flaps its wings in one location, that could displace enough air to cause a tornado or some other large scale atmospheric storm elsewhere.
