A surprising new scientific paper suggests that the pattern of global wildfires varies based on the day of the week — with considerably fewer fires globally on Sunday than on other days. And not only that: It partly attributes this pattern not to anything natural about ecosystems, but rather to human behavioral patterns — including weekly rituals that are ultimately rooted in culture and faith.
“Our weekly routines are based on religion originally,” says Nick Earl of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who published the research in Geophysical Research Letters with two colleagues. “And you can see that in the weekly cycle of fires.”
To show as much, the researchers used NASA satellite imagery to look at all global fires from 2001 to 2013, with images taken four times each day. The images were then scanned by an algorithm to detect large fires, which can occur both for natural reasons — i.e., lightning — but also due to human causes, including arson and accidents, deliberate forest management, and the lighting of fires for forest clearing and agriculture (the apparent source of the Indonesian peat fire catastrophe that occurred this year). This appears to have been the first time that researchers tried to detect a weekly cycle in the occurrence of global fires — which, if fires were a purely natural phenomenon, shouldn’t exist. “There’s nothing in nature that’s on a weekly cycle,” Earl says.
Yet after applying various statistical tests to the very large set of data, the researchers found that while patterns varied by region, the results on a global scale showed a considerable drop in fires on Sunday, as well as a weekly peak on Tuesday.