Stunning images from space reveal the shocking extent of Australia's bushfire crisis
Himawari-8 overlooks the western hemisphere and photographs this face of Earth once every 10 minutes. Australia, its brushfires, and smoke plumes are easily visible.
NASA's Suomi NPP satellite, which orbits about 500 miles up, offers a much closer view of the planet — though a less consistent one. Here, Australia's brushfires are shown picking up in November.
Redder and longer wavelengths of light, such as near-infrared, can show fiery hotspots on the ground through the haze and smoke.
Embers from fires that began in September have spread easily in abnormally long, dry, and expansive drought.
This animation, from January 1 and 2, highlights multiple hotspots in normally invisible infrared light. Two especially large patches of brushfires (shown just southwest of center) stretch dozens of miles long.
Daytime satellite views of the ground are equally if not more dramatic. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite took this image of growing brushfires while passing over Bateman Bay on New Year's Eve.
Source: Twitter
The scope of the fires is hard to comprehend. In New South Wales alone, blazes have created a fire front in the state that — if put into a straight line — would stretch from Sydney, across the Indian Ocean, and into Afghanistan.
Source: Twitter
The smoke plume alone is currently about 1.3 billion acres, or half the size of Europe, and is drifting more than 1,000 miles over New Zealand, where it is choking and yellowing the skies.
Source: Twitter
So far the brushfires have chewed through more than twice the area that burned in Amazon's rainforests during 2019.
Source: Queimadas
At least 17 have gone missing in the fires, eight have died, and hundreds of thousands have evacuated. Volunteer firefighters are working around the clock to curtail the disaster, though it may burn until cooler fall temperatures arrive in the southern hemisphere several months from now.
Aylin Woodward contributed reporting to this post.
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