[derefr]

That isn’t the statistic I would expect to be pulled out here. Not all land area has any chance of catching/spreading a fire. Fires don’t really spread through rainforest; they definitely don’t spread through rocky areas; nor, really, through swampland; nor across mountain ranges; nor through irrigated cropland. (Nor through modern concrete cities, but city land-area is negligible.)

There’s definitely some portion of the US land mass that’s covered in either dry brush, dry underbrush, or dry grass. But that portion is pretty small, I would think. It could actually be that a fairly large portion of “potentially burnable” land-area catches fire each year. (That doesn’t imply anything about there being any less of it for next year, though; it recovers!)

[ALittleLight]

This propublica story has a lot of detail on the fires. They estimate that there are ~20 million acres overdue for burn and the fires this year are burning about a million acres. If I understood it correctly a million acres burning a year is about what's required for stasis, but the 20 million acre backlog will need to be burned too.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

[reissbaker]

At this point over 3 million acres [1] have burned in CA alone. So, seems like some of the 20 million acre backlog is getting burned through this year.

1: https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/

[joe_the_user]

OK, so in three equivalent years, 50% of what needs to go will be gone - and that will give "herd immunity" to the unburned parts - 'till those get large again, say in 5 more years.

[monkeynotes]

I read it as less than 1% of all land that has burned this year. Not 1% of all land in the US. Can you imagine if 1% of the entire of the US burned!

[firethrowaway]

There are 1.9 billion acres in the contiguous US, making 1% about 19 million acres.

a bad wildfire year is ~10 million acres or ~0.5% (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf). It seems conceivable that we surpass that significantly this year.

[monkeynotes]

Wow. Really puts it into perspective. That's equivalent to approx. the four smallest states all burned out.

[jMyles]

> Fires don’t really spread through rainforest

The region in question is one of the largest temperate rainforests in the world.