At least 17 people have been killed by extreme mudslides in California - here's why the situation has gotten so deadly
Wildfires such the Thomas Fire, which burned hundreds of thousands of acres in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Ventura Counties in December, don't just burn structures. They burn vegetation and the ground itself.
This is what the landscape looked like after being burnt by the fires. The vegetation has not had time to reinstate itself into the soil since the December blazes.
Some research has shown that when water hits charred soil, it can make the ground more dense and water repellent, according to The Washington Post.
Because of the steep topography and fire-hardened soil of the hillsides, the whole region was susceptible to flooding and mudslides at the first sign of rain. The ground became impenetrable and almost unable to absorb the water — like a clay pot dried in a kiln.
On Monday night and Tuesday morning, Santa Barbara experienced a torrential downpour, its first significant rainfall in weeks.
This wasn't an average rain shower. According to the National Weather Service, almost one inch of precipitation fell every 15 minutes.
With little vegetation to stop the hills from collapsing, roughly 100 single-family homes were destroyed and 300 damaged.
Santa Barbara issued a mandatory evacuation order for 7,000 people in neighborhoods below the fire-scorched hills on Monday night, but many residents chose to stay in place. Although authorities can anticipate which regions are mudslide-prone during a storm, those predictions aren't perfect and there's little warning as to when the land will actually give out.
Santa Barbara County will be susceptible to mudslides for years to come, since it can take decades for a region to recover from the effects of a disastrous fire.
What's more, wildfires like the ones that raged through Southern California in December are expected to get more frequent and severe as the world gets hotter.
Already, 15 of the 20 largest fires in California's history have occurred since the year 2000.
More devastating wildfires in the future will likely mean more big mudslides.
Because of climate change, the average wildfire season lasts at least 2 1/2 months longer than it did in the early 1970s. And the amount of land burned in the US since 1984 is double what would have been expected without the effects of climate change.
Weather-related natural disasters cost the US a total of $306 billion in 2017, the most expensive year on record.
And the planet is only getting hotter: According to a recent study in Nature, the planet may get 15% hotter by the end of the century than scientists' highest projections,which means extreme weather and costly disasters are likely to get much worse.
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