Forest Fires – a Scientific Angle

I watched an interesting article about Forest Fires about an year ago. Couldn’t find a better place to share this than my own blog.

I have always wondered at the ecological balance maintained by nature. For that matter nature itself is full of mysteries and wonders yet to be explored. I had always thought forest fires are caused either because of human involvement/negligence or due to heavy lightnings. But I recently found a new and interesting cause for this.

We know drizzle on a sunny day leads to formation of a rainbow. This is because, every single raindrop acts as a prism that refracts the sun light into seven colors. But I never knew these rain drops are also dangerous. Actually these rain drops are capable of triggering a forest fire. Now coming to the science behind this happening. Everyone knows the refractive index of the water drop is 1.33. This is the base for the whole story. The water drop can actually act like a prismatic convex lens(magnifying glass). This lens can intensely converge and focus sun’s rays upon dried out vegetation/leaves, which will in turn get ignited and there starts the whole movie. We can witness yellow dots near every droplet in the picture above.

Ideally in most of the cases the water drop gets evaporated before it could initiate a fire. But a group of water drops intensely focusing on a dried leave could achieve this.