‘This was something new’: what people in Greenland told us about learning to live with wildfires

After several quieter years, wildfires have returned to western Greenland.

Two recent fires have brought renewed attention to a landscape more typically associated with glaciers and melting ice sheets than flames. But when we visited the region in 2023 to investigate a series of unusual large wildfires that burned a few years earlier, local residents told us they would not be surprised if the fires came back.

They remembered how dry the landscape had become before the fires, which made wildfire easier to start and harder to control. For people living around Sisimiut on Greenland’s west coast, these latest events are therefore not entirely unexpected.

Our research suggests wildfires may be part of a new Arctic reality.

During our 2023 fieldwork we spoke to firefighters, local business owners and land-users, tourism managers and international visitors, all of whom had direct experience of the earlier fires. A common thread was that these fires were unlike anything they remembered.

Older generations were particularly shocked. As one resident put it, “it was something new, even for us.” Their recollections match our own analysis using satellite data and newspaper reports that found no landscape fires in western Greenland from 1995 to 2007, but more than 20 since.

Many of those fires, including one which burned in the tundra for several weeks, coincided with an unusually warm, dry spell between 2015 and 2020. Although wetter summers followed, bringing a temporary lull, this year’s fires suggest those conditions have returned.

The surprise wasn’t limited to local residents. This part of Greenland attracts thousands of cruise ship visitors and adventure tourists, many hiking the multi-day Arctic Circle Trail between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut. The hikers we spoke to were shocked to encounter fires: “I’ve obviously heard of wildfires before but, you know, you sort of associate that with Australia or California […] it never crossed my mind that it would ever happen in Greenland.”

That risk has changed how the landscape is managed. Many of the fires took place along the trail, leading local authorities to remind visitors about responsible use of campfires, and to distribute a briefing note on wildfires that we produced.

Greenland has always had at least some fires, and traditional landscape users have long practised safe fire management, for example building fires on bedrock away from vegetation and taking care with smoke ovens, passing this wisdom down the generations to this day. However, the exceptionally dry conditions in those years made the landscape itself much more flammable.

The burning tundra

Unlike the forest fires that dominate headlines elsewhere, Greenland’s wildfires typically burn in the tundra, spreading through mosses, shrubs and organic-rich soils such as peat that are increasingly being exposed as permafrost melts.

This makes them particularly difficult to fight. Firefighters in Sisimiut told us that the fires don’t just burn across the surface, but can smoulder underground for days or even weeks, spreading unnoticed before flaring up again. During long dry spells, nearby lakes may also become too shallow to provide enough water to put out the fires, making an already challenging task even harder in Greenland’s remote tundra.

These fires have far-reaching consequences. Smouldering tundra releases large amounts of carbon that has been locked away in soils for centuries, adding to the greenhouse gases warming the climate. When soot from those fires is deposited on the nearby Greenland Ice Sheet it may even accelerate melting by darkening the surface. The fires also produce fine particulate pollution, which can travel long distances and pose serious health risks to communities far from the flames.

Greenland’s wildfire future

Scientists have warned for years that climate change would increase wildfires across the Arctic. In places such as Siberia it’s already happening. In that context, the 2015-2020 fires may represent Greenland following the same path. As the climate continues to warm, and the conditions that drove the fires become more common, wildfire is likely to become an increasingly familiar feature of a landscape long defined by ice.

“For sure, we have the fire on our memory”, one person we interviewed told us in 2023, when our fieldwork took place in a week of constant rain. But even then, the residents were clear: if dry conditions returned, so would fires.

This summer, after an unusually warm and dry winter, that is exactly what happened.