{"id":2963,"date":"2011-05-02T07:55:36","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T07:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=2963"},"modified":"2011-05-05T04:14:08","modified_gmt":"2011-05-05T04:14:08","slug":"wildfire-at-liantach-in-torridon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2011\/05\/02\/wildfire-at-liantach-in-torridon\/","title":{"rendered":"Wildfire at Liathach in Torridon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend Michele and I popped up to the classic geological area of Torridon in western Scotland\u00a0 to go walking for a few days.\u00a0 We were fortunate to be greeted by glorious weather – the Highlands are hard to beat in such conditions – which was quite wonderful.\u00a0 A remarkable observation was just how dry the ground is at the moment – all of the UK is having a period of exceptionally dry weather that is forecast to persist until late this week at least.\u00a0 Precipitation in the last month has been particularly low, in a month that is typically showery, resulting in very dry conditions underfoot.\u00a0 The consequence in Scotland is that there is a high vulnerability to wildfires as the vegetation dries out.\u00a0 The heather and gorse found in the highlands, and the peat layers that sit below in the valley floors – are quite vulnerable to fires.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend a number of fires broke out across Scotland<\/a>, and with the weather set fair more are likely over the next few days.\u00a0 In Torridon a large fire started on Saturday on Liathach that quickly swept up the mountain to form two fire fronts burning to the east and the west.\u00a0 I took this image of the fire from the other side of the valley on Saturday evening using my iPhone:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The eastern fire front is on the right side of the image, and the western to the left.\u00a0 At the foot of the slope the village of Torridon is visible – the fire came perilously close but the houses were spared.\u00a0 A day later the fire was still burning and had extended considerably.\u00a0 There are some amazing shots of the fire on Steve Carter’s website<\/a>.\u00a0 The upshot of this fire will be damage to a large area of vegetation, which is very sad to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A brief description of a wildfire in Torridon, Scotland, over the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[228,170],"class_list":["post-2963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-scotland","tag-wildfire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}