Reuters: A continent ablaze: South America surpasses record for fires
Last edited Fri Sep 13, 2024, 12:09 AM - Edit history (1)
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/continent-ablaze-south-america-surpasses-record-fires-2024-09-12/A continent ablaze: South America surpasses record for fires
By Jake Spring and Stefanie Eschenbacher
September 12, 20244:15 PM EDT
SAO PAULO, Sept 12 (Reuters) - South America is being ravaged by fire from Brazil's Amazon rainforest through the world's largest wetlands to dry forests in Bolivia, breaking a previous record for the number of blazes seen in a year up to Sept. 11.
Satellite data analyzed by Brazil's space research agency Inpe has registered 346,112 fire hotspots so far this year in all 13 countries of South America, topping the earlier 2007 record of 345,322 hotspots in a data series that goes back to 1998.
A Reuters photographer traveling in the heart of Brazil's Amazon this week witnessed
massive fires burning in vegetation along roadways, blackening the landscape and leaving trees like burned matchsticks.
Smoke billowing from the Brazilian fires has darkened the skies above cities like Sao Paulo, feeding into a
corridor of wildfire smoke, seen from space stretching diagonally across the continent from Colombia in the northwest to Uruguay in the southeast.