At least 106 people have died in the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, with the Lahaina Fire in particular leveling the town of the same name.

The blazes erupted more than a week ago, with wildfire experts widely depicting the deadly event as kicking off a new era of climate disaster, as The Hill reported.

• The Lahaina Fire is 85 percent contained as of Tuesday night within an area of about 4 square miles, according to Maui County. 
  
  
• Another fire in Kula, in Upcountry Maui, is 75 percent contained, while other fires have been fully contained or extinguished. 

Hawaii’s fire risk is far from over.

Federal wildfire projections put the island chain at elevated risk for significant fire through November, and many of the state’s biggest municipalities are in the top quarter of all cities nationwide when it comes to serious fire risk. 
 

Honolulu County — home to more than 1 million people — is under greater threat of destructive fire than 89 percent of U.S. counties, according to Wildfire Risk to Communities, a tool offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service.   

While that risk is lower in urban Honolulu, the city core is still at higher risk for fire than 74 percent of U.S. cities. 

Elsewhere in the islands: The 46,000 people who live in Hilo — the biggest city on the Big Island — face a risk of destructive wildfire greater than 77 percent of U.S. communities. And the 45,000 residents of Oahu’s largest community, Pearl City, are under greater wildfire threat than 87 percent of American cities.   

To put that in context, the Wildfire Risk to Communities tool had pegged now-destroyed Lahaina itself as at higher risk than 92 percent of U.S. towns. 

“All the Hawaiian Islands are forecast to be above normal risk as we go into the fall,” Robyn Heffernan, a fire meteorologist at the National Weather Service, told The Hill. 

One explanation for this heightened threat is simply geography: the islands’ rugged and often-forested volcanic topography make it a challenging terrain to fight fires.  

Firefighters are struggling to contain the Upcountry Fire in Maui, which has greatly eluded control because “hot spots” burning through tight-packed ravines are so hard to access, according to the county. 
 

But climate and development issues are important too. Hawaii is at dual risk from the world’s current oscillation away from the La Niña pattern and into the hotter El Niño — a regular occurrence that is boosting many climate disasters, Heffernan said. 
 

The heat from El Niño is drying forest debris into fuels and readying the land to burn. And El Niño is also leading to powerful tropical winds that fan the flames of any chance spark, Heffernan said. 
 

Those changes are leading to a dynamic that can turn even a relatively small fire deadly, as The Hill reported last week.  

Extreme weather conditions are interacting with the tendency of U.S. communities to sprawl into surrounding wildlands to create fires that move too quickly for people to respond, Heffernan said.  
 

“It’s the quick spread that’s noteworthy [of the Lahaina Fire],” Heffernan said. “And wind is a big player, but we have communities that are just up against these wildland areas — so when you have a fast-moving fire, it can impact people very quickly.” 

Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Giant dust storms in the Gulf of Alaska, which often persist for many days, are influencing the global climate system yet their exact impacts are uncertain, according to a new study.

These storms are so massive that they can be seen by satellites orbiting the Earth, according to the study, published on Wednesday in Science Advances. 

Going to greater heights: Prior to this study, most existing research had focused on dust entering the atmosphere in mid- to low-latitude deserts, such as the Sahara.  

Turning their attention to a very different climate, University of Leeds researchers decided to instead explore a high-latitude — or in this case, far northern — source of sediment and silt.  

A different kind of silt: The Leeds team focused on the Copper River Valley, which extends for more than 275 miles on Alaska’s south coast.  

• The river likely transports about 70 million tons of glacial sediment each year.  
• During summer and fall low-water periods, winds carry the silt hundreds of miles across North America — to latitudes where it can cause ice formation in clouds.  
• Unlike the Sahara dust, Copper Valley River particles contain a greater amount of biological material, deposited by the region’s rich flora and fauna.  

How does silt form ice in clouds? At low enough temperatures, these microscopic pieces of rock, minerals and vegetation encourage the formation of ice crystals in clouds, the researchers explained.  

They do so by acting as “ice-nucleating particles,” or small flecks of suspended dust that help catalyze crystallization, according to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  

Warming and cooling: Such ice formation can either add to global warming or help cool the planet — a trajectory that can shift based on a few key factors, the Leeds researchers found. 

These variables include how much ice the clouds contain, how many ice-nucleating particles are present and the nature of those particles, per the study. 

And without the dust particles? In the absence of dust, water in clouds can remain in a liquid state even when temperatures are well below freezing, the authors noted.   

• “Only a small fraction of the dust particles in the atmosphere has the capacity to nucleate ice,” co-author Benjamin Murray, a Leeds professor of atmospheric science, said in a statement.  
  
• “We are only just starting to understand their sources and global distribution,” Murray added. 

A global mystery: While dust storms play an influential role in steering the global climate system, their precise impacts remain unclear and warrant further research, according to the authors.  

• “Whether a cloud becomes more or less reflective of sunlight depends on how much ice is in them,” Murray said.  
• “We need to be able to understand and quantify the various sources of ice-nucleating particles around the globe,” he added.