An important announcement 🎉 + NASA drones may help fight wildfires one day

… plus curiosities from the Canary Islands, Arctic winters, and more.

Welcome back to another edition of The Detour. We’re back after taking last week off.

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The writer, Kelly Kimball, scouring for news for The World in Numbers // Source: Kelly Kimball

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Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck this week: 

🔥 California’s fourth-largest fire is now a testing ground for firefighting technology — including AI drones

🐠 Spain’s first marine sanctuary

🇦🇶 What’s an Antarctic stare?

Here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world lately:

Kelly Kimball for Frame. // Wikimedia Commons

429,263 acres — The amount of land that has burned in California as of late Tuesday since the start of the Park Fire on July 24, making it the 4th largest fire in the state’s history. Triggered by arson, the fires have resulted in no fatalities but have ripped across the Lassen National Forest that bridges the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and the Cascade Mountain Range.

The Park Fire, marked in red, ignited mere miles from the rural town of Paradise, which in 2018 was destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in California history, the Camp Fire. // Source: CAL FIRE

This rural part of Northern California is no stranger to wildfires. As of today, 5,120 wildfires have rampaged through the state this year alone, per CAL FIRE, with over 814,300 total acres burned.

Here’s a sneak peak into our next Frame story, reported on the ground by photojournalist Marcus Gabbert in mountain towns across Northern California.

Today, many rural communities in Northern California are caught between an economic dependence on the logging industry and the growing threat posed by megafires like that seen in the Park Fire. Indeed, a 2020 economic impact report by the University of California Davis found the forestry and forest products industry contributed around $39 billion and 117,000 jobs to the Californian economy. That’s good, right?

For Frame, Marcus dug a bit deeper: Coupled with expert research, Marcus’ comparison between satellite imagery and CalFire records indicates that the spread and destructiveness of recent megafires throughout California were directly influenced by previous logging operations within the fires’ footprint. These fires threatened not only the land, but also the people who live on it.

Cheryl Ingle lives with her husband Mike in Greenville, California, just east of Lassen National Park where the Park Fire burns today. In 2021, they lost their home to the Dixie Fire. // Marcus Gabbert for Frame.

To get a deeper sense of this, Marcus interviewed Cheryl Ingle, who lives in Greenville, California, just east of Lassen National Park where the Park Fire is burning today. In 2021, they lost their home to the Dixie Fire. Stay tuned for her full story when we publish Marcus’ piece later in August.

$1 million — The amount of returned devices of Humane’s AI Pin. The AI tech company’s AI-powered device has triggered a rash of bad reviews, fire hazards, and product returns that between May and August outpaced their product sales, The Verge reported this week. It has become the latest example of “the ultimate example of tech hubris.”

24,000 hectares — The size of Mar de las Calmas, which is just off the coast of the Canary Island of La Hierra and roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, or twice the size of San Francisco. If all goes according to plan, Mar de las Calmas could become Spain’s first entirely marine national park any day now and join the rank’s of 16 other national parks in the country. The plan dovetails with the country’s longterm goal of making at least 30% of its marine space protected by 2030. (Although, like many countries, it’s quite far off from that goal, according to the marine conservation tracker Marine Protection Atlas.)

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