Engage with a new Data Puzzle focused on how and why megafires have changed over time.

Join us on Thursday, March 31st from 3-4 pm PT, 4-5 pm MT, 5-6 pm CT, 6-7 pm ET as developer Jon Griffith and Ambitious Science Teaching co-author Melissa Braaten describe their newest Data Puzzle, Megafires: Rare Occurrences or the New Normal?, a 2-day MS/HS resource in which students analyze megafire frequency data to explain how and why the number of megafires has changed over time.

Megafires: Rare Occurrences or the New Normal? Overview

"Megafire" is a term that is used frequently by the media but can have many different meanings to describe wildfires. You may be surprised to learn there is no one accepted definition of the term. Scientists who study megafires are developing their own definition of a megafire that typically describes extreme fire events characterized by their intensity, speed, duration, impact, and size. In considering the size of megafires, Dr. Natasha Stavros of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes megafires as wildfires that are larger than 95% of all of the fire events being studied in a 1984-2019 dataset. Using these parameters, megafires are larger than 20,000 football fields in size! In this Data Puzzle, students will engage with an interactive reading before analyzing authentic datasets to discover how and why the number of megafires has changed over time.

About Data Puzzles

Inspired by our friends at Data Nuggets, Data Puzzles combine classroom-friendly scientific datasets with the research-backed pedagogical practices of Ambitious Science Teaching to give your students the ultimate inquiry-based learning experience.