{"id":107046,"date":"2026-09-06T06:10:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T10:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=107046"},"modified":"2026-09-06T06:11:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T10:11:27","slug":"indonesia-peat-fires-burn-underground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/indonesia-peat-fires-burn-underground\/","title":{"rendered":"The Peat Fires Under Indonesia Won&#8217;t Stop Until It Rains"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>9 Minute, 33 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>The sky over parts of Indonesia has gone the colour of weak tea. Flights are delayed. Schools have moved lessons back onto screens. Nine national parks closed their gates. People have been told to stay inside and keep the windows shut.<\/p>\n\n<p>And here is the strange part. If you flew over it, you would not see much fire.<\/p>\n\n<p>Indonesia&#8217;s peat fires do most of their work underground. They creep along under the surface, slowly, at a low temperature, through soil that used to be a swamp. They can keep going for months. And the satellites we built to spot wildfires can barely find them.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Why Indonesia&#8217;s Peat Fires Are So Hard to See<\/h2>\n\n<p>The instruments that watch for fire from orbit look for heat and light. That works well for a forest burning in the open. It works badly for a fire that is under the ground with a thick lid of smoke sitting on top of it.<\/p>\n\n<p>NASA&#8217;s Earth Observatory put the problem plainly: the sensors struggle to see through heavy smoke, through cloud, through the forest understory, and through the peat itself. Which leads to a genuinely unsettling sentence in their write-up &#8212; the worst smoke events can be the hardest ones to observe from space.<\/p>\n\n<p>The thicker the disaster, the more it hides itself.<\/p>\n\n<p>Indonesia&#8217;s Ministry of Forestry counted 946 hotspots on 31 August 2026. That number is not the number of fires. It is the number of fires that could be seen.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>What Is Actually Burning<\/h2>\n\n<p>Peat is not soil in the ordinary sense. It is plant matter that fell into water and never fully rotted, because water kept the air out. It piles up like that, layer on layer, over an enormous stretch of time. Indonesia holds roughly 36% of the world&#8217;s tropical peatlands.<\/p>\n\n<p>So a peat fire is not burning this year&#8217;s leaves. It is burning a store that took far longer than a human life to build.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is also why the smoke is so bad. Compared with other tropical forest fires, peat fires put out around three times more fine particulate matter, five times more sulphur dioxide, three times more organic carbon, and twice as much methane and carbon monoxide. It is a low, dirty, patient kind of burning.<\/p>\n\n<p>The scale is easier to feel with one comparison. Indonesia&#8217;s fires in 2015 released about 1.75 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas equivalents over roughly three months. By 2 September 2026, about one month into this season, the fires had already released somewhere near a tenth of that.<\/p>\n\n<p>The dryness that let it start is not subtle either. In early August, about 90% of Indonesia got little or no rain at all.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Part That Was Decided Almost Thirty Years Ago<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here is the detail that changes how the whole story reads.<\/p>\n\n<p>Wet peat does not burn. It cannot. The water is the reason the plant matter never rotted in the first place, and the water is the reason it will not catch. A healthy peat swamp in a drought is a wet sponge in a drought. It just sits there.<\/p>\n\n<p>Indonesian peatlands burn because a great deal of that water was taken out on purpose. Through the 1990s, irrigation canals were cut and peat swamps were drained to open the land up, much of it for oil palm and plantation forestry. The canals did exactly what canals do. They carried the water away, and the water table dropped.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which means the fire is not really the injury. The fire is what a drained landscape does when a dry year arrives. The injury happened decades earlier, quietly, in a way that looked at the time like progress and made no smoke at all.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Actually Puts It Out<\/h2>\n\n<p>Mostly, nothing does. Not directly.<\/p>\n\n<p>Crews can fight the flames they can reach on the surface, but the fire underneath keeps moving and keeps coming back up. The honest answer from the people who study this is that these fires burn until the rains return in October or November. The season ends them. Firefighting mostly holds the line until it does.<\/p>\n\n<p>But there is something that works &#8212; and it works before there is anything to fight.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is called rewetting: putting dams into those old canals so the water stops draining away and the water table climbs back up. Researchers at the University of Leeds, publishing in <em>Geophysical Research Letters<\/em> in 2026, looked at where this had actually been done across Sumatra and Kalimantan. Across nearly 4,000 square kilometres of peatland where the rewetting worked, fire hotspots dropped by up to 22% between 2015 and 2019.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then comes the caveat the researchers themselves put on it, and it is the most interesting line in the whole study.<\/p>\n\n<p>The canal blocks only really hold when they are new. The team found that blocks around a year old were the ones genuinely keeping the peat wet. Separate work covering 2015 to 2024 found that 70% of canal-blocking units had been damaged. The same comparison found deep wells did better than canal blocks, partly because pumped water reaches further and the infrastructure lasts longer.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the fix is real. It is measurable. And it is not an event.<\/p>\n\n<p>You do not rewet a peatland once. You rewet it, and then you keep rewetting it, because water leaves and dams break and the ground goes quietly dry again while everyone is looking somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Burns Under People<\/h2>\n\n<p>It is hard to read all that and not think of someone you know. Possibly yourself.<\/p>\n\n<p>Almost everyone is carrying something that works this way. Not a live argument &#8212; those are visible, and visible things get dealt with. The other kind. The thing that finished years ago and still decides your tone of voice with one particular person. The grudge so old it has stopped feeling like a grudge and started feeling like a personality.<\/p>\n\n<p>It gives off almost no heat. That is exactly why it never gets addressed. And every so often something on the surface catches, and everyone including you is surprised by how hot it went, because nobody was looking at what was underneath.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is an old line in the Bible about this, and the picture it reaches for is not a fire. It is a root &#8212; a root of bitterness springing up, underground and out of sight, and it does not stay personal; it spreads to the people standing nearby. The sentence that names it opens by warning about something else entirely: people running short on grace. The two sit together in one breath. The root grows in the place where the water went out.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which, if you have ever tried to put one of these down, is about right. Forgiving is not really an act of firefighting. It is closer to putting the water back &#8212; and then, awkwardly, having to do it again next month, because <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/does-forgiving-mean-forgetting\/\">forgiving does not delete the memory<\/a>; it changes the weight the memory carries. And it does not always wait for the other person. Sometimes it is a thing you do <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-answers\/how-to-forgive-someone-who-isnt-sorry\/\">without an apology ever arriving<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>If you are not sure whether you are anywhere near ready for that, there is a free quiz on this site &#8212; <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/am-i-ready-to-forgive\/\">Am I Ready to Forgive?<\/a> &#8212; that is honest enough to tell you no.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Waiting for October<\/h2>\n\n<p>Indonesia will get its rain. It usually comes in October or November, and when it does, the smoke thins, the parks reopen, the flights run on time, and the ground goes quiet.<\/p>\n\n<p>The peat will still be there. So will the canals. And whether the whole thing happens again next dry year depends almost entirely on something unglamorous: whether anyone keeps the water in during the years when nothing is burning.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is the part nobody photographs. It is also the only part that ever changes the outcome.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n\n<p>Is it better to deal with a problem while it is still invisible, or do most people only ever act once there is smoke? Tell us what you think in the comments &#8212; we read them.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Wet peat can&#8217;t burn. Indonesia&#8217;s peatlands only catch fire because the water was drained out of them in the 1990s. The fire isn&#8217;t the injury &#8212; it&#8217;s what a drained landscape does in a dry year. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/indonesia-peat-fires-burn-underground\/<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The worst smoke events can be the hardest to observe from space.&#8221; Read that again. The thicker the disaster, the better it hides. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/indonesia-peat-fires-burn-underground\/<\/li>\n<li>Rewetting a peatland cuts fires by up to 22%. But the dams only work while they&#8217;re new, and 70% of them were found damaged. The repair isn&#8217;t an event &#8212; it&#8217;s maintenance. Which is true of more than peat. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/indonesia-peat-fires-burn-underground\/<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask<\/h2>\n\n<h3>Why do peat fires burn underground?<\/h3>\n<p>Peat is plant matter that fell into water and never fully decomposed, building up in thick layers over a very long period. When that peat is drained and dries out, it becomes fuel that sits below the surface. Fire moves through it slowly and at a low temperature rather than flaring up in the open, so it can smoulder underground for weeks or months while very little shows above ground.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why can&#8217;t satellites detect Indonesia&#8217;s peat fires?<\/h3>\n<p>Fire-detecting satellite sensors look for heat and light from above. According to NASA&#8217;s Earth Observatory, those sensors struggle to see through heavy smoke, cloud cover, the forest understory, and the peat layer itself. The result is a paradox: the worst smoke events can be the hardest ones to observe from space, because the smoke that makes an event severe is also what blocks the view of it.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Are peat fires worse for air quality than forest fires?<\/h3>\n<p>Yes. Compared with other tropical forest fires, peat fires release roughly three times more fine particulate matter, five times more sulphur dioxide, three times more organic carbon, and twice as much methane and carbon monoxide. That is why smoke from peat fires closes schools and delays flights across a wide area, and why health warnings follow them.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How are peat fires actually stopped?<\/h3>\n<p>Direct firefighting has limited effect, because the fire continues underground where crews cannot reach it. In practice, Indonesia&#8217;s peat fires largely burn until the seasonal rains return in October or November. The measure that reduces them in advance is rewetting &#8212; blocking the old drainage canals so the water table rises again. A 2026 University of Leeds study in Geophysical Research Letters found that across nearly 4,000 square kilometres of peatland where rewetting was effective, fire hotspots fell by up to 22% between 2015 and 2019.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why does rewetting a peatland need ongoing maintenance?<\/h3>\n<p>Because the dams do not last on their own. The Leeds researchers found that canal blocks around a year old were the ones genuinely keeping peat wet, and separate work covering 2015 to 2024 found that 70% of canal-blocking units had been damaged. Deep wells performed better than canal blocking in that comparison, partly because pumped water reaches a wider area and the infrastructure lasts longer. 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The reason they can burn at all was decided almost thirty years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226,3708],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bgodinspired-science-news","category-nature-and-creation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107046"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107049,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107046\/revisions\/107049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}