Gigafire

When we coined the term "megafire" for wildfires that exceed 100,000 acres, it was in the back of our mind that if a fire reached 1 million acres it would be called a "gigafire".

In addition, due in part to human-caused warming and a drying climate, California recorded its first "gigafire" since modern records began in the early 1930s.

In a historic fire season with million-acre gigafires and more than two dozen deaths, the destruction in Happy Camp barely broke through the long list of dire news stories making the headlines.

From Category 5 hurricanes to flooding from sea-level rise to gigafires, the value of losses from severe weather or climate-related disasters in the United States over the past several years has been unprecedented.

Just a few years ago, fire scientists thought that the burn scars of all these megafires and gigafires might help check future spread, theorizing that it would take a while for the landscape to recover and that what would grow back could prove less flammable than what burned originally.