Image taken from ABC News.
The smoke from the West Coast wildfires has traveled thousands of miles to New York – and if you looked up at the sky from campus last week, you may have seen a sunset-like haze that didn’t go down that night.
Each place that the wildfire smoke hit has been affected differently. In states along the West Coast, sunrise was replaced with an orange sky, a fog of smoke, and what some call a nuclear winter. In New York, smoke blocked out so much sunlight that temperatures dropped about 5 degrees and a dull cloud blanketed the sky.
“It looked like a scene from a movie,” said Austin Kim ‘23 who is remote in Fullerton, CA. “The sky looked really abnormal. There was ash falling everywhere. It became dark, the temperature got a bit cooler because the ash was covering the sun and the sun was red.”
In California, there is so much air pollution that people there must take precautions.
“Where I am, you can see the small particles everywhere around you,” Kim said. “The air quality has been really bad for the past few weeks. I smelled a little bit outside – it just doesn’t smell right.”
Environmental Studies and Sciences Professor, Nurcan Atalan-Helicke, shared that what she could see from New York was “the colorful sky one day.” But nothing else in New York was directly affected by the smoke. “It was not affecting air quality here – you would not smell it or breathe it but just a visual reminder that there is something not normal about the clouds.”
The plumes of smoke, with carbon monoxide from the wildfires, were getting caught in the atmospheric jet stream and carried across the United States, according to the National Weather Service.
In the atmosphere, carbon monoxide can remain for about a month and be transported many miles. While gas at that high an altitude has little effect on the air we breathe, according to a statement from NASA, carbon monoxide in the sky plays a part in air pollution and climate change.
According to Atalan-Helicke, even thousands of miles apart, ecosystems are all connected to one another. “We tend to forget that we are all connected. Often, we assume that the hurricanes that hit the Gulf of Mexico will stay contained there, floods along the Missouri river just affect the Midwest and wildfires would affect drought-stricken and hot places like California,” Atalan-Helicke said. “However, as the ecosystems are connected, the impacts may also be felt somewhere else, in the short or long run. We may not associate the events to the impacts as they may emerge later (sometimes months, sometimes years).”
Ultimately, the grey sky last week was not the end of the California wildfires in New York.
“The wildfires along the West Coast are a reminder that natural events that we associate with a region are no longer contained events. They also do not happen once-in-a-while but increase in intensity and frequency, and their impacts are long-lasting,” Atalan-Helicke said. “If we look at the top 20 wildfires in California history, we will see that all but three happened in the last 20 years. There is a human element in causing these wildfires, and the area they affect is increasing.”
While the smoke in New York is gone, the wildfires in California are still burning – and there is still more yet to come.