A study on the 2012 fire season, and the increasing amount of large, difficult to control wildfires has been released. The study shows that over the last forty years, there has been a significant increase in the amount and size of wildfires. In the last decade, there have been seven times as many fires that are larger than ten thousand acres than there were in the 70s. In Colorado and some other Western states, the number of wildfires that are larger than a thousand acres has quadrupled in the last forty years. Some scientists say that the increase in fires is due in part to an early spring snowmelt and rising average temperatures.