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Fire impacts plants most directly via heat damage. However, new studies indicate that hydraulic failure kills trees during a fire in addition to fire scorching. High temperature cuts the water supply to the canopy and causes the death of the tree [citation needed].
Fires can affect soils through heating and combustion processes. Depending on the temperatures of the soils during the combustion process, different effects will happen- from evaporation of water at the lower temperature ranges, to the combustion of soil organic matter and the formation of pyrogenic organic matter, such as charcoal. [11]
Fire has also been used for centuries as a method of torture and execution, as evidenced by death by burning as well as torture devices such as the iron boot, which could be filled with water, oil, or even lead and then heated over an open fire to the agony of the wearer.
This high flame temperature is partially due to the absence of hydrogen in the fuel (dicyanoacetylene is not a hydrocarbon) thus there is no water among the combustion products. Cyanogen, with the formula (CN) 2, produces the second-hottest-known natural flame with a temperature of over 4,525 °C (8,177 °F) when it burns in oxygen. [11] [12]
Coal-seam fire instances on Earth date back several million years. [2] [3] Due to thermal insulation and the avoidance of rain/snow extinguishment by the crust, underground coal-seam fires are the most persistent fires on Earth and can burn for thousands of years, like Burning Mountain in Australia. [4]
A backdraft can occur when a compartment fire has little or no ventilation. Due to this, little or no oxygen can flow into the compartment. Then, because fires reduce oxygen, the oxygen concentration decreases. When the oxygen concentration becomes too low to support combustion, some or all of the combustion switches to pyrolysis.
The elements are not, therefore, tiny building blocks like atoms, but rather the constitutive properties (i.e. contraries) of the simple bodies (fire, air, water, earth) found in sense-perception. Meteorology deals primarily with the interaction of three elements: air, water, and earth. A cloud is a composite that mixes all three.
The blue fires also occur in Yellowstone National Park during wildfires, when fires burn and melt the large amounts of sulfur present in the park, creating the appearance of burning blue rivers of lava during such events. Remnants of past episodes exist on the ground in the form of black lines, where fires have previously melted sulfur. [7]