SSS
Soil System Sciences

Soils at Imaggeo: Badlands in central Spain

Saskia Keesstra, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Badland in central Spain. Click on the image to see the original picture and details at Imaggeo.

Badland in central Spain. In the image, Ana Lucía Vela (Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy).

Description

This composite shows a constellation of combined visual and infrared imaging of a smouldering combustion front spreading radially over a thin sample of dry peat. The central watch is created by a series of twelve wedges. Each wedge is extracted from a photo taken every 5 min from an elevated view looking down into the sample during the one-hour lab experiment. The circular peat sample (D=22 cm) was ignited on the centre by an electrical heater. The average radial spread rate was 10 cm/h and the peak temperature 600°C. The top figures show the virgin peat (left) and the final residue (right). The bottom figures show the wedges in visual (left) and infrared (right) imaging. Smouldering combustion is the driving phenomenon of wildfires in peatlands, like those causing haze episodes in southeast Asia and Northeast Europe. These are the largest fires on Earth and an extensive source of greenhouse gases, but poorly studied. Our experiments help to understand this emerging research topic in climate-change mitigation by characterizing the dynamics of ignition, spread and extinction, and also measure the yield of carbon emissions.

About Imaggeo

Imaggeo is the EGU’s online open access geosciences image repository. All geoscientists (and others) can submit their photographs and videos to this repository and, since it is open access, these images can be used for free by scientists for their presentations or publications, by educators and the general public, and some images can even be used freely for commercial purposes.

All the material in this database is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, which means that Imaggeo content is owned by the individual creators and that they must always be credited when their content is used. People interested in submitting material to Imaggeo can also choose a more restrictive licence, such as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 licence. For more information please check the Copyright page.

Antonio Jordán is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Seville and coordinator of the MED Soil Research Group. Antonio’s research focusses on rainfall-induced soil erosion processes, the effects of wildfires on soil properties and soil degradation in Mediterranean areas. He is an active members of the Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), which coordinates the scientific programme on soil sciences.