California fire officials say a massive wildfire in Southern California has reached megafire

status, fueled by near 100 degree heat and bone dry conditions. The Gifford fire north of Santa

Barbara has already burned more than 104,000 acres. That's an area bigger than Atlanta.

Megafires, which burn more than 100,000 acres,

have become increasingly common in recent years, testing the men and women who fight them.

A new book, When It All Burns, Fighting Fire in a Transform World, is the first-hand account of a season

with a team of elite firefighters, the Los Padres hot shots. The author is

Jordan Thomas, who is also an anthropologist. Jordan Thomas, help us understand what is it like

to be on the front lines of a wildfire? These are some of the largest wildfires that humans have

ever encountered in our recorded history. So science is having a

hard time to even understanding what these wildfires are going to do. So what it's actually like

to fight wildfires is you're living on some of the most extreme edges of the climate crisis

in triple-digit heat, basically mountaineering with chainsaws to remove fuel from the edges of fires.

And so it takes an extreme amount of tactical athleticism and a really intense level of

knowledge of landscapes and fire behavior as well.

Talk about the knowledge of landscapes.

You've got to be constantly assessing the landscape as you're fighting the fire, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So you have to be paying attention to the vegetation,

to the slope of the landscape, and changes in all these different weather patterns, including

the temperature, the humidity, and the wind, because all of these things change what fire does.

And when you're working on the edges of fires day after day, hour after hour, week after week,

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