In what has become a big story this week, details are finally emerging about wildfires burning in South America’s Amazon Rainforest. The Amazon fires became bigger news Monday afternoon when Sao Paulo was buried under a cloud of smoke from the fires. Since multiple news outlets and even celebrities (through social media) have pointed out the fact that the South American rainforest’s burning could be detrimental for the earth considering they produce 20% of the world’s oxygen.
Daily Imagery and heat detections from NASA’s EOSDIS Worldview shows all the Amazons fires activity. Here’s a snippet from the last week on the borders of Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay.
Media Coverage of the Amazon Fires
In the case of Sao Paolo, Officials with Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) said the darkness was the result of humid air and smoke from the shear number of fires burning in the Amazon rainforest thousands of miles away. According to the Brazil’s INPE research centre, there have been 35,000 more fires detected across Brazil. This is an 84% increase over the same period last year . Those 75,000+ fires have raised concerns that an increase in deforestation is wrecking havoc on the world’s most important climate change combatant, the Amazon Rainforest, where many of them have been and are burning.
The World Meteorological Organization tweeted about the size and coverage area of smoke, which shows exactly why Sao Paolo experienced what they did.
From the other side of Earth, here’s the latest on the Amazonia fires ????
Produced by @CopernicusEU’s atmosphere monitoring service, it shows the smoke reaching the Atlantic coast and São Paulo ????????
DATA HERE▶️https://t.co/Q6qzFdPfIT pic.twitter.com/aJKU2YwRpJ
— WMO | OMM (@WMO) August 20, 2019
CNN is also reporting the “Fires are raging at a record rate in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and scientists warn that it could strike a devastating blow to the fight against climate change. The fires are burning at the highest rate since the country’s space research center, the National Institute for Space Research (known by the abbreviation INPE), began tracking them in 2013, the center said Tuesday.” Sure makes sense why everyone is all up in arms about it.
Sources:
http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/
https://twitter.com/WMO/
CNN
