Even if you’re living on the other side of the earth, you’ve probably heard about the devastating fires that are currently raging in Australia. Today we stumbled across an image that might help you to better understand just HOW big the area of land burnt in Australia is.
This breathtaking image was created by twitter user Neil Kaye. The area of ground burnt in Australia is 60,000 km² and the smoke covers a truly enormous area of 5.5 million km². This is what this would look like over Europe.
I’m looking at this image, but my brain still is not able to comprehend what I am looking at. The area is just too big. It’s like half of Germany was on fire and almost the whole continent of Europe was under a giant smoke cover.
The area of land burnt in Australia is almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed as by the 2018 fires in California.
As if this wasn’t bad enough. The aftermath is already reaching New Zealand and it’s snow covered glaciers. Ash from the fires is causing the glacier to melt much faster than usual. Here’s a video of the current situation down under:
This the view from the top of the Tasman Glacier NZ today – whole South island experiencing bushfire clouds. We can actually smell the burning here in Christchurch. Thinking of you guys. 😢#nswbushfire #AustralianFires #AustraliaBurning pic.twitter.com/iCzOGkou4o
— Miss Roho (@MissRoho) January 1, 2020
Canberra’s air (the capital of Australia) on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe. As if this wasn’t enough bad news, there’s more.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. I cannot comprehend just how big the number of “half a billion” animals is. Below you can see footage of kangaroos feeling from the fire:
Heartbreaking footage of kangaroos fleeing has been captured in Monaro, NSW, as bushfires close in.
For more fire updates: https://t.co/m3qKpIZsu5 pic.twitter.com/Jo6MDtuygC
— news.com.au (@newscomauHQ) December 31, 2019
I usually try to stay away from negative news and posts, as I feel there’s enough coverage out there. I try to focus on positive, good news – but looking at this image made me realize just how bad the problem was and I wanted to raise awareness to this issue.
We can’t do much as an immediate action to stop the fire right now. But we can try to live in harmony with the nature.
Eat all the food we buy, don’t buy things we don’t need, try to re-use, recycle most of the stuff we use. Things like that might help to prevent even bigger fires and more catastrophes in the future. Of course only if we all stick together!
