Kirsten Vanstone, Executive Director of RCIScience, reflects on the impact of wildfires on the scientific institutions she holds dear.
Activity associated with the Bobcat Fire. Image from the southern-facing HPWREN live webcam on the Mount Wilson Observatory, captured at 7:51 PM PDT on September 17 2020. (Image credit: Mount Wilson Observatory)
About a week ago, I was glued to my computer screen hitting refresh on the webcams that show the view from Mount Wilson near Los Angeles, California. It was like lightning in a horror movie, with each flash revealing a monster inching ever closer. As the cameras refreshed, the flames of the Bobcat fire crept towards the Snow Solar Telescope. All evening, I commiserated with friends and former colleagues at the loss of this spectacular instrument and the potential loss of the entire observatory where Edwin Hubble discovered how big our universe actually was.
As it happens, our grief was premature. The flames caught on camera over that long night were actually backfires set as firebreaks to protect the historic site. As of today, the Mount Wilson Observatory is safe and has even hosted firefighters on a thank you tour of the telescope where Hubble worked. Rather than cepheid variable stars in a distant galaxy, they viewed the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The Bobcat fire is still only 62% contained, though, and things could change in a heartbeat.
Astronomers were already primed for disaster. In August, we watched helplessly as the webcams atop Mount Hamilton showed flames approaching the historic Lick Observatory. This mountaintop near San Jose, California is home to seven major telescopes, a laser that bounced off a mirror on the Moon and pioneering experiments in adaptive optics, which remove the air-induced twinkle that makes stars charming to the eye, but damage observations.
As it happens, the Observatory also houses the actual remains of James Lick, the man who donated the money to build it. He decreed that cremation was not for him. “No sir!”, Lick declared, “I intend to rot like a gentleman.” And rot he does under the base of the Great Lick Refractor, which, fortunately, still stands. The winds carried the fire in another direction and Lick’s body escaped the flames once again. For now anyway.
Like storms, wildfires are given names. This is necessary to distinguish them, as the conditions that enable wildfires mean there is rarely just one burning at a time. As I write this, there are 28 fires large enough to be named on the Cal Fire website. If 2020 wasn’t bad enough already, five of the top twenty wildfires in California’s history have burned this year. According to Calfire, 7,874 structures have been damaged or destroyed, more than 1.5 million hectares have burned and most devastatingly, 28 lives have been lost. For the more prosaic, these fires have caused an estimated $1.5 billion US in damage.
This is a bad fire season for California. And Washington. And Oregon. Canada has been lucky to more or less escape massive fires this year, but we have seen our fair share of conflagrations. Fort McMurray in 2016 being the most serious and the largest natural disaster in Canadian history. The Kenow Fire in the Waterton Lakes National Park area in 2017 and the Mountain Park Fire in the Okanagan Valley in 2003 each burned more than 25,000 hectares and caused great disruption to residents.
2018 showed that the east is not immune, with Ontario recording 1,325 fires, almost double the normal yearly number. This included a massive fire that burned between North Bay and Parry Sound. Cottage country and beloved summer camps were subject to air quality alerts and, in some cases, evacuations. From afar, sunsets were spectacularly reddened by suspended smoke particles.
Mt. Stromlo Observatory outside Canberra, Australia, lost five telescopes during a 2003 fire. (Image credit: Kim Rawlings)
It cannot be denied that the fire seasons are getting worse. Not just in North America, but around the world. Australia’s Mount Stromlo Observatory outside of Canberra was not as lucky as Mount Wilson and Lick. It burned to the ground in 2003, carrying with it a relative of Richmond Hill’s David Dunlap Observatory’s Grubb-Parsons telescope, along with a century of science and a wonderful set of public exhibits and public spaces.
There are a combination of factors that conspire to build these giant fires, not the least of which is climate change. It is, to say the least, uncomfortable to watch as the continued denial of science is partly to blame for the loss or threatened loss of scientific research facilities which played a part in establishing climate science.
For me, these fires are personal. I lived in California for a time and often worked at a small observatory in the Sonoma wine country near Santa Rosa that housed an historic refracting telescope made by legendary craftsman, Alvan Clarke. With a long brass tube, a lens at one end and eyepiece at the other, this actually looked like a telescope. It was named for its original owner, George Davidson, a surveyor who founded the California Academy of Sciences as a repository of scientific knowledge in the American West. Davidson is, in many ways, the analogue to Sir Sandford Fleming, who formed the Royal Canadian Institute for a similar purpose just a few years earlier.
Descriptions of the wonders Davidson viewed through this telescope had, in fact, helped inspire an ailing James Lick to endow an observatory as one of his legacies. I was privileged to provide views of those same wonders for many people at outreach events. It had a fascinating history, from winning a prize at the great Philadelphia Exposition of 1882 to travelling all over the US and even to Japan, revealing solar eclipses and transits of Venus to curious eyes and minds.
Before moving to its final Sonoma home, the telescope had been painstakingly restored. Its precision machining cleaned or, in some cases, remade and replaced. Gears repaired and rebuilt and even a period postal stamp inserted as a shim to ensure the lens was positioned perfectly.
In 2017, Davidson’s telescope and the rest of the observatory burned to the ground in the Tubbs Fire. A small, misshapen lump of glass is all that remains of what was once a perfectly figured lens shaped by the hand of a master. That lovely portal to the cosmos is now permanently closed. And I am still angry about that. I am angry that I will never get to look through it again. I will never hear an excited gasp as a kid sees the rings of Saturn for the first time. An exquisite view that lead to conversations about how things are on different planets. These conversations inevitably circled back to our own planet and how it is uniquely able to support life as we understand it.
All I can hope is that the kids I met at that special place will do better than we have. That they will believe what science has revealed to us about the universe and how it works. That when they see a planet like Saturn or Venus, they will understand that the fate of our own world is in the balance. And that they will take action to make change.
To learn more about what is behind the massive wildfires of the 2000s, I encourage you to read Edward Struzik’s fantastic book, Firestorm, which the RCIScience Book Club is reading through October. And of course, tune in to our coming panel discussion World on Fire: The Science of Living with Wildfires this Sunday, October 4.