How to Read the Mind of a Wildfire

From studying tree rings to creating intricate computer models, scientists are trying to understand why flames behave the way they do.

Ecologist Don Falk points out a fire scar on a fallen tree stump. (Brian L. Frank)

In a stand of ponderosa pine trees high in the Santa Catalina Mountains overlooking Tucson, Arizona, forest-and-fire ecologist Don Falk squatted with me next to a 100-foot-tall tree born a decade or two before American independence. At the base of the trunk, the tree's thick cinnamon-colored bark gave way to a shallow opening a foot wide and two feet high that looked like a series of successively smaller triangles. Falk ran his hand along the charred edges of the opening and explained what we were looking at: a window into the forest's past, and fire's role in shaping it.

Falk studies fire-scarred trees to understand how frequent, severe, and widespread fires have been in an area, and how those patterns have shifted over the centurieswhich is also a key to understanding why some fires are bigger, more unpredictable, and more destructive these days, How do you know anything on Earth has changed? he asks. You have to be able to compare it to how things were in the past. This is how we know the history.

Fire on the Mountain: Making Sense of the Yarnell Disaster

Long before the Mexican-American War, when this land still belonged to Mexico, a fire swept up this mountain slope. Short flames wrapped around the tree and curled like an eddy in a stream, lingering on the back side, where accumulated leaves and pine needles caught fire. The flames stayed long enough to penetrate the bark and killed a portion of the cambium, which produces new cells. The tree slowly healed itself, pushing edges of new growth onto the dead area, year after year. But the scar remained. The next fire that came through left another scar, and the next fire another. If we examined a cross-section of the tree, we could use the rings to figure out the exact year of each fire.

Falk works down in the valley at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, which occupies a gleaming new four-story glass-and-metal cube and holds 2 million wood specimens from around the world, the largest archive of its kind. The lab's founder, an astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglass, created a new discipline called dendrochronology: the analysis of tree rings to interpret and date past events. He used rings to date ancient Aztec and Pueblo ruins in the southwest by studying trees used in their construction, and he found that trees in the region grow more in wet years than in dry years, a first step in our understanding of climate change.

Falk, his face tanned by long days in the field, walked with me through the pines. He stopped at a large ponderosa-pine stump, two feet across, cut smooth by a chainsaw. To understand wildfire today, everything we've done to try to control it, and the problems those efforts have wrought, this was a good place to start. He brushed fallen pine needles from the stump and offered a quick reading of the tree's fire history: Born in the mid-1700s, it shows scarring from fires every decade or two, the rings curled like breaking waves around the wound. But something curious happens after the marks from an early-1900s fire: the scars stop. The tree rings continue out toward the edge, for decades, slowly healing that last fire wound, until the tree died several years ago.

The Mysterious Science of Fire

Where did the fires go? Grazing animals consumed some of the fuels that would have carried fire. Then, a century ago, we embarked on a campaign to banish fires from forests, with a goal of extinguishing them soon after they started. But that wasn't such a good thing for the forest. When fires don't come through regularly, fuels accumulate. A couple of centuries ago, forests like this one in the southwest might have had a few dozen trees per acre, widely spaced, with an open, savannah-like floor. Today an acre might be crowded with thousands of mostly smaller trees. When fires do burn, they're more destructive, often killing the big trees along with the small.

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How to Read the Mind of a Wildfire