1 . A forest after a wildfire

Throughout my career, I’ve had many chances to enter various wildfire areas. But I’ve ________ had the opportunity to see the immediate scene after a fire.

So when I ________ into a recently burned forest, my first reaction was the deathly ________ hung in the air. There were no birds, no breeze caught in the leaves of a tree, or animal noises. It felt as if life itself had totally ________ from this place. What was even worse, the burned-out forest meant that a large amount of ________ alongside the road was no longer ________ by the under-growth (灌木丛) . Oil cans, glass, plastic bags—you name it, and you can find it.

Knowing there was a story here that needed ________ , I raised my camera with a heavy heart, no matter how ________ . Photographing burned-out areas is ________ , since there is really only a bunch of burned-out wood. Through my lenses, I sought to connect viewers to the ________ of the disaster.

For a nature photographer passionate about environmental protection, it’s important to ________ the ugly as well as the beautiful. We need to put those two things together, so while ________ hope, we are aware of what has been taken from us, and how ________ that loss can be. Without that balance, we risk becoming used to a world shaped by destruction and not the one of ________ . Nature will regenerate, but now, we must consider what ________ we humans play in that process, too.

2 . Dry lightning(雷电)can still be harmful even when conditions aren’t so dry, said a study published in Geophysical Research Letters last month. Dry lightning during little to no rainfall was previously thought to cause wildfire danger only with less than 2.5mm of rain in a day. A Washington State University-led study of wildfires in the US West found dry lightning caused wildfires despite up to 7.7 mm of rain.

“The rainfall amounts we recorded should help provide a better understanding of just how much rain can cause a fire risk,” said Dmitri Kalashnikov, lead author of the study.

The researchers analyzed(分析)cases on more than 4,600 naturally caused fires from 2015 to 2020. They matched 3,726 of those to the lightning strikes that likely started them with the help of National Lightning Detection Network.

The study found that 15.3% of those were holdover fires which burn without smoke, bringing about over a hundred fires each year. Analyzing the rainfall amounts around the time of the lightning strikes showed greater rainfall than previously thought among the earlier found fires ranging from 1.7 mm to 4.6 mm.

While humans still cause most fires either by accident or on purpose, lightning-caused wildfires burn the most areas. Nearly 70% of the wildfire-burned land in the West was from lightning-caused fires according to the study. For example, the largest wildfire burn area in California history took place in August 2020 after dry lightning caused many wildfires at once.

Dry lightning can also start wildfires in places that are hard for firefighters to reach. This study found the places where holdover fires happened repeatedly were in the forested mountains of the Southwest as well as the middle and southern Rocky Mountains. Holdover fires cause the problem because they are so hard to notice.