years. Fires such as the one that burned the photographer’s house did not exist for the first four billion of these years. The fire triangle—the triangle of heat, oxygen, and fuel—was incomplete on two sides. There were lightning strikes and lava flows to provide heat, but no oxygen and no fuel. Oxygen began to accumulate two billion years ago, pumped out of the oceans by algae, with levels becoming comparable to those of today five hundred million years ago. Around then, in the time of trilobites and ammonites, plants crept ashore. On mudflats and rock shelves close to the tide line, mats of algae developed. Moss evolved. A sort of fungus or lichen grew twenty feet tall with a trunk three feet thick. Club mosses and horsetails and ferns appeared on the scene.
Another name for these plants: fuel. The primitive land plants closed the fire triangle. The most ancient charcoal in the fossil record appears in the early Devonian, four hundred million years ago.
The powdery yellow spores of club mosses would eventually be used in fireworks and explosives. In the 1800s, along with candles, alcohol, phosphorus, and hydrogen, Faraday, during his candle lectures, burned club moss spores, calling the spores by the scientific name of the plant. “Here is a powder which is very combustible,” he wrote, “consisting, as you see, of separate little particles. It is called lycopodium, and each of these particles can produce a vapor, and produce its own flame; but, to see them burning, you would imagine it was all one flame.”
As plants crowded the land, they pulled carbon dioxide from the air and then died, locking that carbon dioxide away. The net effect was a cooling climate, a reverse greenhouse effect eventually offset as fuel accumulated and wildfires became common.
The nineteenth century French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, known for his work on vibrations and heat transfer, realized that the earth, based on its distance from the sun, should be a much colder planet. Its average temperature should be close to freezing, but in reality it hovers around sixty degrees. Why? He considered that heat might come from space, “from the common temperature of the planetary spaces.” He considered that the “earth preserves in its interior a part of that primitive heat which it had at the time of the first formation of the planets.” But in the end he focused on the atmosphere and oceans. For the most part, his work focused on the distribution of heat. “The presence of the atmosphere and the waters,” he wrote, “has the general effect of rendering the distribution of heat more uniform.” Heat from the tropics found its way north and south. But somehow—and he did not know how—the earth’s atmosphere trapped the heat of the sun. By virtue of the atmosphere, most of the earth was habitable.
Fourier, thanks to papers he published in 1824 and 1827, is widely credited with the discovery of what would become known as the greenhouse effect.
Before the photographer’s house burned, before it could burn, the atmosphere evolved. Four and a half billion years of change set the stage for the Tea Fire—the fire that took a photographer’s house and photographs, took his neighbor’s house too, burned or partly burned 219 homes spread across three square miles, converting prized possessions into misshapen lumps and fire art, but miraculously killing no one in its flames.
Heat, the first side of the fire triangle, was provided by college students who lit a bonfire up above Mountain Drive, near the abandoned ruins called the Tea House. The students said the fire was out before they left, but authorities suggested that the bonfire still held life, warm coals that the students missed. Fuel, the second side of the fire triangle, stood as dry chaparral, a shrubby mix of chamise and scrub oak and California lilac and black sage, with a few Coulter pines and the remarkably flammable Australian
Another name for these plants: fuel. The primitive land plants closed the fire triangle. The most ancient charcoal in the fossil record appears in the early Devonian, four hundred million years ago.
The powdery yellow spores of club mosses would eventually be used in fireworks and explosives. In the 1800s, along with candles, alcohol, phosphorus, and hydrogen, Faraday, during his candle lectures, burned club moss spores, calling the spores by the scientific name of the plant. “Here is a powder which is very combustible,” he wrote, “consisting, as you see, of separate little particles. It is called lycopodium, and each of these particles can produce a vapor, and produce its own flame; but, to see them burning, you would imagine it was all one flame.”
As plants crowded the land, they pulled carbon dioxide from the air and then died, locking that carbon dioxide away. The net effect was a cooling climate, a reverse greenhouse effect eventually offset as fuel accumulated and wildfires became common.
The nineteenth century French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, known for his work on vibrations and heat transfer, realized that the earth, based on its distance from the sun, should be a much colder planet. Its average temperature should be close to freezing, but in reality it hovers around sixty degrees. Why? He considered that heat might come from space, “from the common temperature of the planetary spaces.” He considered that the “earth preserves in its interior a part of that primitive heat which it had at the time of the first formation of the planets.” But in the end he focused on the atmosphere and oceans. For the most part, his work focused on the distribution of heat. “The presence of the atmosphere and the waters,” he wrote, “has the general effect of rendering the distribution of heat more uniform.” Heat from the tropics found its way north and south. But somehow—and he did not know how—the earth’s atmosphere trapped the heat of the sun. By virtue of the atmosphere, most of the earth was habitable.
Fourier, thanks to papers he published in 1824 and 1827, is widely credited with the discovery of what would become known as the greenhouse effect.
Before the photographer’s house burned, before it could burn, the atmosphere evolved. Four and a half billion years of change set the stage for the Tea Fire—the fire that took a photographer’s house and photographs, took his neighbor’s house too, burned or partly burned 219 homes spread across three square miles, converting prized possessions into misshapen lumps and fire art, but miraculously killing no one in its flames.
Heat, the first side of the fire triangle, was provided by college students who lit a bonfire up above Mountain Drive, near the abandoned ruins called the Tea House. The students said the fire was out before they left, but authorities suggested that the bonfire still held life, warm coals that the students missed. Fuel, the second side of the fire triangle, stood as dry chaparral, a shrubby mix of chamise and scrub oak and California lilac and black sage, with a few Coulter pines and the remarkably flammable Australian
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