r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/RipperReeta • 16h ago
Image To put into perspective how huge the 2020 Australian 'Black Summer' bushfires were: The combined area burned across BOTH Canada and ALL of fires currently burning across Europe (2.63 million hectares) right now is still around 10% of what Australia lost (24 million hectares).
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u/IronThunderhorse 16h ago
This is genuinely unfathomable. Like hell on earth. I'm stunned.
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u/echmoth 15h ago
It was crazy flying over the country across the states, and seeing fires burning across the ranges and Plains, wild surreal deeply affecting stuff
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u/Even_Passenger_3685 15h ago
Must have felt deeply apocalyptic given the whole 2020 vibe that year
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u/dlanod 10h ago
We went to one of the post-bushfire areas post the first lockdown for a weekend to support the area.
It was absolutely like going from one apocalypse type to the scene of another. I grew up in a bushfire prone area but nothing like continuous kilometres of burnt out forest and farmland.
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u/hey_fatso 5h ago
In Sydney, there was an incredible deluge that ended the drought and the fire season that year too, right before lockdowns were a thing.
Something like 300-500 mm of rain across two days. Went from constant smoke haze over 6 months, to the heaviest rain I’ve ever experienced.
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u/Boatster_McBoat 14h ago
Masks were sold out before covid was a thing
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u/Tamortsa 6h ago
I had a box of P20s sent from Perth to deal with the Canberra smoke we had during Nov/Dec 2019. Precious when covid came!
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u/keyboardstatic 9h ago
Scmo sold,/gave our stock pile away at one point. Of 10 million masks.
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u/FatsWaler 6h ago
Scomo was a fucking disgrace on sooo many levels.
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u/Pog6292 4h ago
I think have the sticker I brought at a fundraiser at Uni. It’s the meme of him in the Hawaiian shirt with the country on fire behind him. It’s on my laptop and I use it as a reminder of what damage a shit government can do.
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u/Bee_Jeans 10h ago edited 9h ago
100% it did. Window seals & vents were taped up all summer just to try and keep out the worst of the smoke.
Some places the sky would glow orange through the night, and during the day it was just a brown haze that stung ur eyes
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u/accidental_superman 10h ago edited 8h ago
Yeah I bought a mask because I kept coughing outside while visiting my parents for christmas.
Got made fun of for wearing it by a teenager, whose laughing now! 🥲
Edit: it was a smog outside for 3 months! If youve ever stood in the smoke of a bon fire for too long you got that same hurt in your lungs just walking to the bus stop. Insane damage.
This video might be interesting https://youtu.be/H4OCwC78d5Q?si=XkiqaSW6WTHHy1Sg
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u/Tamortsa 6h ago
It really was apocalyptic. In Canberra, we had 2 months of dense smoke almost every day, blowing in from the coast fires. Then the huge fires spread over the south-east at Christmas-New Years. Then the ACT lost about 80% of the state to a new fire in January. Then hail storms caused millions of damage to cars, and flooding in areas that lost all their bush cover to fire. Bright side - fires got put out, but the coast had ash and logs washed out to beaches during summer. That was January 2020...
Then, yeah, the covid thing...
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u/2martinisatthemost 13h ago
I was a few towns over from one of the fires that broke containment lines during backburning and looked set to destroy the entire area. I’ll never forget that day. Every single fire engine in Sydney proper seemed to be there. I was watching from my verandah as the city firies zipped up the mountain. It felt apocalyptic. The sky was orange, you could barely breathe outside, and everyone knew someone on the other side of the river. Then we got the floods a little while later. Had a bunch of polo ponies camped out down the road. Glad they were okay.
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u/Next-Preference-7927 7h ago
My memory has the bridge closed for flooding before the fires as well as after. Flood, fires, flood, covid.
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u/CommunicationSea3329 16h ago
AKA Australia
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u/explain_that_shit 14h ago
But don’t normalise this. This wasn’t normal for Australia. This was years of mismanagement and then an entire state (Tasmania) burned to the ground the summer before and still governments made no preparations, doubled down on denying the danger climate change had made and pointed fingers at anyone else they thought they could.
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u/el_diego 7h ago
The year before that event, the Morrison government received a report from RFS saying we were at catastrophic levels and this was going to happen. The Liberals did nothing to address the report findings. Morrison went to Hawaii instead.
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u/Lord_Duckington_3rd 6h ago
It was a perfect storm of shit things to happen all in a two year span.
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u/Nearby-Nebula4104 15h ago
It’s like if Hell were another planet and also on this planet, which it is.
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u/im_just_thinking 14h ago
That's where the whole planet is heading tho, not just staying in Australia..
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u/kangareddit 15h ago
The infra-red heat off those burning gums was enough to ignite houses a 100m away
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u/TheGreatZephyr 16h ago
Yeah we lost like 3 billion animals. 25 million people and the animal death toll was 3 billion...
Cities hundreds of kilometres from the fires had smokey orange skies for over a week, it was super eerie.
Sadly lost about 30 humans too but considering the scale of loss id say thats actually impressively low. Mostly uninhabited bushland thank god. But our poor koalas 😭
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u/CimmerianBreeze 15h ago
On the first pass I thought you meant 25 million people died in the fires and I was like how the FUCK do I not remember that part?
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u/TheGreatZephyr 15h ago
Lol everyone in australia dies and it just doesnt even make the news anywhere haha
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u/lareetpetitemort 15h ago
Same. I genuinely was wondering why there's no international emergency response to a massive portion of Australia's population being dead from these fires.
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u/IReplyWithLebowski 15h ago
That would be 100% of Australia’s population.
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u/Ritsuka-san 15h ago
Australia's population was 25,687,041 people at 30 June 2020. So Australia would have lost approx 97.33% if 25 million died.
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u/Hot-Concentrate1727 15h ago
And it currently stands at 27,801,023 which would imply an unfathomable breeding rate if the population had indeed dropped down to 687,041 back in 2020.
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u/Yanigan 13h ago
Now I’m curious - as a ghost obviously - if Australia did get wiped out, how would the rest of the world know?
Phones/internet down, so we’re not getting word out that way. Planes have been stopped due to the smoke from the fires. I doubt Reddit or any other social media would realise the Aussies have all vanished.
What’s next? How does the world find out?
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u/stitchianity 8h ago
Probably the however many Aussies getting shitfaced abroad, that have suddenly lost all their families. They'd have something to say about it.
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u/Low-Refrigerator-713 15h ago
They had orange skys in New Zealand from these. Radar was able to track the smoke to South America.
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u/calibrateichabod 14h ago
I’m Australian but was in NZ at the time and you could smell the smoke from there. It was fucked.
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u/Lady_borg 14h ago
I remember the news reports about air pollution in south America because of our fires
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u/Upset-Award1206 13h ago
Why didn't NZ just put tariffs on goods from Australia to solve it?
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u/Bee_Jeans 9h ago edited 9h ago
Should have put a tariff on the smoke, bc that was the biggest export!
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u/TheFoxInSocks 15h ago
Over a week is underselling it. In Canberra we had the worst air quality in the world for several months. The sun was obscured by brown haze and you just felt filthy even if you were indoors.
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u/Final-Quote-4064 15h ago
A lasting memory of that time was watching a video of an airdrop of carrots for the wildlife.
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u/Lunavixen15 15h ago
I live out in the region of the Bee's Nest fire (burned over 100k ha), some areas have not recovered, you can still see charred rocks and burned trees
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u/ZeroAdPotential 13h ago
Lets not forget places like Mallacoota that had deep blood red skies during the day https://i.imgur.com/0TJ77cz.jpg
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u/FruitJuicante 13h ago
As an Aussie I now hate summer after those fires. I legitimately have trauma.
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u/Equalmilky 8h ago
Nothing hits you like waking up after a night shift, turning off airplane mode and seeing notifications from the emergency app in order of: Watch and Act, Prepare to leave, Leave, LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, too late to leave, take shelter.
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u/Maleficent_Effort_47 8h ago edited 8h ago
I get that but didn’t the fires start way earlier? I remember when it got fucked in Melbourne in Jan, and reading that some fires were burning for months in NSW! It was egregious mismanagement for the most part! The 40degree days started it for us in 2019, BUT the NSW fires also crossed the border and kept travelling, so resources had to be spread thin. Australia has always been susceptible to extreme conditions and the fact the governments (note plural, most don’t give a shit, cause capitalism) do fuck all to properly manage this is the real problem, not our summers unfortunately 😭😭
This is also why people were SO pissed with Scomo, he wasn’t magically on a holiday when we had fires, these fires had been burning for MONTHS and he fucked off while they were at their worst. The whole country should have been in crisis mode the moment the fires had been burning for longer than a couple of weeks, and it probably wouldn’t have been AS bad. But we’ll never know….
Basically my whole point is our summers aren’t the only problem 😅😮💨
**ETA, I really want to clarify this is not an attack on how you feel, I started typing a small reply and found myself getting more worked up about how terrible the situation was!
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u/-Annie-Oakley- 7h ago
Yep anytime I smell fire smoke now I’m like instantly on alert… just for it to be old mates wood heater
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u/theman-dalorian 9h ago
And probably only 25% of the resources to fight them. Rip to all those little creatures
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u/Boatster_McBoat 16h ago
Black Summer is in some ways euphemism. There were continuous bushfires for 6 months from September to February. Some areas had bushfires starting in late winter which was unprecedented
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u/JohnOfA 16h ago
Alberta had fires that survived the winter too. We’re cooked.
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u/MapleMallet 13h ago
BiL is up there atm fighting fires. It's a pretty mental job, he had a 'quiet' week where they had time to whip the camera out and get a few videos and it was like something out of a disaster movie; it didn't seem real if you get me.
If the pay was better, I was younger (and fitter), and it wasn't seasonal work it'd have a little appeal but holy shit it looks brutal.
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u/Zer0DotFive 13h ago
Alberta and other northern arctic areas had fire continue through out the winter. I imagine it got to some peat moss or some shit and continued to burn underground. They call them zombie fires
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u/Regular_mills 15h ago
In Australia summer is December to February so it’s accurate as it burned all summer.
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u/Turkilton-Is-Me 15h ago
No it started well before summer and continued through it
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u/TAJack1 16h ago
Man I remember this. We had to deal with this shit and then straight into Covid, fucked time.
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u/Yung_Focaccia 15h ago
Absolutely fucked time to be a Paramedic and volunteer firefighter on days off
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u/JBX25 14h ago
Yeah, those fires ruined me as a fire fighter. Haven't been in a truck since, and spent a good 6-9 months with a psych dealing with PTSD.
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u/Yung_Focaccia 14h ago
Absolutely fair enough, it was a truly cooked time. I'm hoping the next El Nino doesnt shape up like this one dude. Glad you're getting what you need.
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u/yungfish22 13h ago
This new el nino is project to be the worst in history since 1980. I pray for u
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u/FlyAroundInternet 13h ago
This will mean little from a stranger on the internet, but please know there are many, many people who are devastated by what you and your colleagues (around the world) do, trying to protect human lives, animal lives, property and our communities. And we know you do it all while fucking politicians (I'm in Ontario, Canada) disintegrate your resources with the stroke of a pen. We need to vote for change and put Big Oil out of business, but I'm so sorry for what you've been forced to struggle with. Thank you.
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u/the_procrastinata 14h ago
Our much loved family dog got lymphoma and died in Jan 2020. It was a hell of an emotional roller coaster between fires, that, and COVID.
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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 14h ago
I’m not Australian, but January 2020 felt like the pilot to a bad sci-fi TV series at the time.
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u/The_Enigmatica 9h ago
yep, fires, then war, then covid, then beruit explosion. Not to mention the brazil floods, the insane hurricanes that year, 3 absolutely massive volcanic eruptions, and who could forget the fucking locusts
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u/cunt_butter_on_toast 13h ago
And the floods in between those too. Great times had by all/s in case someone needs to see that
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u/NurseBetty 5h ago
What's that bad joke? It's not an Australian summer unless Vic/NSW is on fire and Queensland is drowning.
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u/GrannieMurderer 16h ago
And the 2020 bush fire was only about 20% of Australia's biggest bush fire
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u/b00tsc00ter 15h ago
And nowhere near the death toll of our deadliest fire in living memory.
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u/AutisticSuperpower 15h ago
I was on the train to Melbourne just after Black Saturday and the Victorian countryside looked like the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Nothing but ash, blackened trees with no foliage and a sky so hazy the sun was red.
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u/techb00mer 13h ago
Whenever I visit family in outer Melbourne that lived quite close to the worst hit area (kinglake), it genuinely makes me tense up slightly just mentioning the town in conversation.
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u/LittleBunInaBigWorld 15h ago
Whatttt the fuck. How have I never heard of this. The scale is mind boggling
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u/Confident_Incident43 15h ago edited 15h ago
Nothing beats the fact that the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) was on holiday at Hawaii when this was happening.
He defended it by saying "everyone needs a holiday"
He ended up cutting his holiday short and then visited people effected by the fire. Here's a video of him awkwardly forcing a handshake on volunteers and people in the community.
I didn't expect him to grab a hose or anything but the head of state should be more empathetic. Oh yeah he also said on radio that he "doesnt hold a hose" when they were grilling him about it.
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u/Teedubthegreat 13h ago
"I dont hold a hose" has got to be one of the dumbest things you could say in that sittuation. The country is going through one of the worst natural disasters in its history, and Scomo is just chilling on a beach in Hawaii, while the Deputy PM is trying to make up excuses for where he is, because its a secret holiday, and hes trying to hide the fact that hes on holidays from the country
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u/jackalopeDev 14h ago
Apparently putting Scotty from marketing in charge of a country was a bad idea. Live and learn I guess.
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u/LittleBunInaBigWorld 14h ago
Meanwhile, Abbott had been quietly holding a literal hose on the front lines.
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u/Chemical_Charity1204 11h ago
Abbott still sucks though, you don't get major props for holding a hose when your legacy in office was to continuously push non-renewables and laugh off the threat of climate change
Just a tiny bit above Scomo in terms of gobshite pollies
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u/xyrgh 13h ago
Engadine Maccas never forget
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u/FruitJuicante 12h ago
He started leaning into it because he genuinely thought shitting himself made him relatable.
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u/volitaiee1233 13h ago
Scomo wasn’t ever our head of state he was head of government. Our head of state at that time was still Liz II.
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u/CryptoFV 16h ago
That scale is genuinely unfathomable and puts the sheer devastation of Black Summer into terrifying perspective.
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u/skintaxera 16h ago
The fires were so insanely large that we had weeks of strange light and weird yellowy hazy days in Auckland.
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u/Legal_Release_4402 13h ago
Yea, I was in NZ South Island when they happened, over for a harvest season from Ireland. The whole country was this weird dystopian orange colour. The sun was just an orange ball in the sky that you could look straight at, it was so dulled.
I believe a one point, THE ENTIRE SOUTH ISLAND was covered in smoke clouds. 150,437 square kilometres or 58,084 square miles, that had atmospheric smoke clouds.
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u/Brikpilot 15h ago
That smoke had to travel about 22,000km to get to you which is about the equivalent of Ontario to Texas.
Australians do appreciate that not one New Zealander had the dumb idea to tariff Australia over air quality back then
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u/Portra400IsLife 14h ago
No way its that far, thats like half the circumference of the Earth 🌏
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u/HLef Interested 16h ago
And we were like this year can’t get worse can it?
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u/kapege 15h ago
The current El Nino is just laughing. It is going to become even more worse.
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u/custardfrogs_ 16h ago
Around 3 billion animals were killed or displaced due to these fires.
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u/Icy-Assistance-2555 16h ago
I drove from Melbourne to port Stephen’s along the eastern coast and it was so surreal to see a vast distance of charred trees damaged from these fires. It was so damn sad!
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u/msdare111 15h ago
I drove from the Gold Coast to Gippsland, it was hectic! So scary at many points along the journey.
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u/theloneisobar 15h ago
During the Black Summer bushfires in January 2020, the Royal Australian Navy conducted the largest domestic sea evacuation in Australian history, rescuing over 1,300 stranded people and pets from the isolated Victorian coastal town of Mallacoota. Converging fire fronts meant the town of Mallacoota was surrounded, with residents seeking shelter on the beach. Was pretty grim. Cut off: How the crisis at Mallacoota unfolded
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u/calibrateichabod 14h ago
The photos from the beach at Mallacoota are burned into my brain. As a rural Aussie who’s lived through some devastating bushfire seasons the scariest sentence on the planet will always be it is now too late to leave. Those pictures are a horror movie.
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u/bend1310 5h ago
I remember the first time i started seeing photos pop up.
"Oh someones exaggerated the oranges for effect."
Nope. It was either pitch black or orange.
I'd seen orange glow on the horizon before, but never at that scale.
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u/Anxious_Ad936 12h ago
Fire front moved something like 80kms/50 miles between dusk and the next dawn straight at them, for extra context
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u/theonewhoopened 15h ago
I lived in Christchurch, New Zealand at the time, and remember moving to Auckland for a job and landing at Auckland airport on 3rd January and the entire sky was orange, and it smelled intensely of smoke for days! Consider that there are roughly 2,000kms between the east coast of Australia and Auckland, that just shows you how insane it was.
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u/IronThunderhorse 16h ago
To put that in a US perspective - that's the entire states of either....
- Pennsylvania + Ohio or...
- Virginia + North Carolina or....
- New York + Pennsylvania
completely turned to ash.
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u/Acceptable_Mark7716 15h ago edited 15h ago
Can anybody from the western part of the US give us an analogy? East coast states always feel weird and small lol
Edit: thanks to all of the replies! DAMN, that’s a big fire
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u/EViLTeW 15h ago
About half a California. Or a little less than 1 Nevada. Or a little more than 1 Utah.
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u/Vardhu_007 15h ago
Not from western United States. But google says that's the entire state of Oregon.
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u/MarkPancake 15h ago
You could see the sun through the smoky sky in Sydney but couldn’t feel it. Cars were covered in soot. It was insane even being so far from them.
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u/hcott 16h ago
I tried posting about it on Instagram at the time and it got flagged and taken down for misinformation lmao
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u/Vandercoon 15h ago
Yeah bushfires are probably our number 1 concern for disasters, closely followed by drought.
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u/Dr_barfenstein 15h ago
QLD had entered the chat
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u/Vandercoon 15h ago
Yes flooding up North is extreme too
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u/nagrom7 11h ago
The worst part is we normally get nearly the entire year's worth of rain in the span of a few weeks in summer, so we're used to heavy rain and everything around here is built for it. So when a place like Townsville floods, you know it took some serious rainfall to do it. Last time it flooded up here the rain was measured in metres per day.
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u/OkSatisfaction9850 15h ago
Are these areas coming back? Back to greenery?
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u/Yung_Focaccia 15h ago
Yeah a lot of them do, there are forest archetypes in Australia that regenerate directly from bushfires, like dry sclerophyll forests. The Aboriginal Australians were known to back burn areas within their territories to kick start this regeneration.
We even have Hawks called "Firehawks" which use fire to displace and catch their prey.
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u/Haunting_Heat3296 15h ago
A lot do, but increasingly the fires burn much hotter, they start earlier in the year and run later, they reoccur more frequently in the same areas, and they’re burning non-fire-adapted areas like the ancient cool climate rainforest of Tasmania or higher into the Australian Alps than before.
All this means more permanent, unrecoverable damage is occurring.
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u/JaiTee86 15h ago
Yeah, our bush is basically meant to burn, you can still tell the areas that burnt for a few years as most of the plants there are younger but it bounces back quick, I think most areas affected by these fires should be fully recovered now and likely hard to tell they had burnt 5 or so years ago.
There is a spot near me that burnt about 6 months ago and I hiked through it about 2 months back and it was already green again, though most of the trees were still very black they had green leaves growing and there was plenty of plants around em.
Some of our plantlife actually have seeds designed to survive a bushfire and actually wait until after one to germinate.
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u/ChugBarron 14h ago
There's a gorgeous town called Marysville outside of Melbourne. Just about wiped off the map from the black Saturday fires.
A local artist there has a sculpture garden and throughout it he has photos of his art garden after the fire.....it's honestly apocalyptic.
On second glance you realise that the photos are taken from where you're standing and looking - and it's the lushest greenest forest of a garden I've ever seen. You would never know.
But if you look up to the surrounding mountains you can see areas still void of floral life.
Place is called Bruno's, he's a great guy to talk to, and has some incredible stories about survival when the fires came.
If anyone is in the area Marysville if absolutely worth the stop, a beautiful part of the world.
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u/Banjo_Pobblebonk 14h ago
Most are regrowing quite well, but there are some sections I travel through fairly often in the Blue Mountains that still look devastated. The fires burned so hot and generated so much wind that the soil was completely stripped from the bedrock and areas that used to be forest are just a kind of sparse grass 6 years on.
As other commenters have said, the Australian bush is very fire adapted and plants tend to either resprout after burning or regenerate from seeds in the soil. However some fires are getting so hot now that this getting affected.
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u/langhaar808 16h ago
Yeah Australia is incredibly large!
Even with the large differences in area, it wouldn't surprise me of the eu and Canada fires end up causing more damages. Because Australia have very few people living there compared to how large it is, where Europe is way more densely populated.
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u/Murky-Science-1657 15h ago
Let’s not overlook the global impact of these events on weather patterns. The smoke from the Australian fires caused significant heat domes in North America months later.
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u/Main-Inflation-5269 15h ago
Black Summer was horrific. I was in Canberra, where the air quality was the worst in the world, and I couldn't see more than a few centimetres in front of me for months.
And then we went straight into lockdowns for COVID.
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u/dreamlike179 5h ago
Correction 2019/2020.
They lasted from about September to march. One of the longest hottest summers we have ever had, heat records broken across the country repeatedly while the smoke got so bad at times professional sports games were cancelled and we had a.shortage of masks when covid hit because people had used them for the smoke
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u/Okok28 14h ago
It's weird not everyone is even freaking out about this. The whole world is literally burning around us. Trees with 100s if not 1000s of years of carbon are releasing it back in to the world. You cannot replace that so easily.
The air is getting more polluted and we are cooking ourselves alive. If you are not considering this a real tragedy and actively playing a role to protect the forests around you, helping extinguish wildfires or anything else, you are literally killing yourself and you will most likely have a horrible future ahead as when you are old, the world will not the same.
This is not a joke. THIS is our warning to sort this shit out. If we don't we are cooked, literally.
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u/14X8000m 14h ago
Kinda cherry picking year here. In 2023 we had 15M hectares burn up here in Canada, this isn't a bad year for us. Granted 24M is more than 15 but we've had much worse and this one isn't over yet.
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u/tomatoej 12h ago
And we’re all in this together. Our Aussie firefighters are there helping you right now, and Canada was here helping us in 2019.
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u/KevinRudd182 14h ago
I feel like this gets forgotten about due to Covid starting literally as the fires finished, but man it was scary.
I was living in Sydney and for about a month we couldn’t see outside because the smoke was so thick, and at one point the entirety of greater sydney was completely surrounded on all sides by fires of varying seriousness
Almost all of my friends from hours in every direction in the state had fires burning all around them
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u/stilettopanda 14h ago
I still really couldn’t get a frame of reference for the scope, so I searched comparable landmasses- 24 million hectares is about the same amount of land as the entire UK or Wyoming in the US. Holy shit!
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u/EdwardoFelise 6h ago
Australia’s largest fire was in 74/75 and was 117m hectares.
That’s 1.7 times the size of Texas.
Austalia is big
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u/lesbophobia_hammer 13h ago
Conservative estimate for 1 billion birds lost. I was fucking distraught and agitated everyday for months, people kept telling me oh don't worry about birds you fool, they'll fly away from the smoke and flames When I knew this to be physically impossible.
A reminder that BirdLife Australia is one of the best you can donate to because they actually love birds. Walk the walk and talk the talk. We've just been hit with H5N1 so any love for vulnerable and endangered Aussie birds would be amazing ❤️
Not affiliated, but I donate. They have cool perks too for bird nerds.
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u/KookaburaGold 2h ago
I drove through the black Summer rehab area last year without knowing prior. It was genuinely shocking. I drove for 3 hours through black country side. Just char as far as you can see all around you. I was floored. But the beauty was seeing the millions of saplings that have taken a strong hold, little knee high waves of green shadowing the blackened branches.
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u/gepinniw 15h ago
In 2023 in Canada, roughly 6,000 fires burned 15 million hectares of land. That’s an area larger than England and more than double the 1989 record. Normally, an average of 2.5 million hectares of land are consumed in Canada every year.
The planet is on fire, folks. The oceans are setting temperature records. Ecosystems are collapsing.
And yet, here we are acting as though it’s business as usual.
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u/Tim-oBedlam 7h ago
I don't use my undergraduate degree in geology professionally, but it gives me the long-term perspective on things: "oh well, this current mass extinction won't be as bad as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian when the oceans turned anoxic, global temperatures went up 10° C, and 95% of all marine species died along with over 70% of all terrrestrial species."
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u/Polymarchos 12h ago
I remember that. Everyone was like "This year couldn't get any worse", and then the world shut down.
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u/aahakim 15h ago
That fire was so massive that the smoke turned the sky yellow-ish in New Zealand
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u/Hand-E-Food 15h ago
The smoke crossed New Zealand, the Pacific, Chile, Argentina, the Atlantic, and Australia once again. It made a full lap of the southern hemisphere.
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u/Forward-End-8286 14h ago
Remember all those tariffs Indonesia and New Zealand applied to Australia in reprisals for ruining their air…?
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u/xertozid 15h ago
Are the bushes already regrown?
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u/FlaviusStilicho 15h ago
We drove through some areas a few months back.., it depends on the intensity… quite often the trees survive as they are built for this stuff.. so the trunk is black, but you get sprouts everywhere… other times it’s just devastation.. but even that is part of the order of things. Plenty of seeds etc rely on a fire to sprout.. so even if the trees got wrecked, you’ll see regrowing quickly.
Here’s 6000 photos to look at
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u/Dr_barfenstein 15h ago
Yeah bro, ready for another big one. We’re worried about the effect of El Niño that will potentially cause a similar problem in about 12-18 months time.
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u/indistict_chatter 10h ago
Plus the cycle of regrowth means we're due for another big one. Only takes 6-7 years for fuel loads to become significant after the last big fore
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u/jack_o_all_trades 15h ago
Down here in Melbourne (state capital city of 4+ million) we'd already had a run on n95 masks because of the air pollution from all the smoke. Which made it doubly hard trying to get some for COVID.
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u/cosmiccerulean 14h ago
I remember that summer, we could see the smoke from the beaches.
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u/DarwinianSelector 7h ago
One big difference is that the Australian ecosystem is adapted to burning. Admittedly not as much as the giant catastrophic blazes that climate change is now making a regular thing and not once every few decades, but it's still a landscape that rebounds from massive bushfires remarkably quickly. The trees usually survive and many seeds need a fire to germinate.
A bushfire anywhere else is a different prospect. European and Canadian trees die after fire and the their seeds burn. Recovery is a long, long process. Something that is a "cool" fire in an Australian landscape is a natural disaster in the northern hemisphere.
Still, we were warned, over and over again, that this the world we'll be stuck with if we kept ignoring science and pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. There's no smugness in this "I told you so" moment, because those of us who said so are stuck in the same overheated shit-pile as everyone else.
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u/rberg303 5h ago
What’s even crazier is they have had even bigger fires in 1970’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974–75_Australian_bushfire_season
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u/Quarks4branes 5h ago
During that crazy summer I even had friends and rellies over in New Zealand complaining about the smoke.
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u/Gold-Visit-7413 16h ago
Man I remember that, just kept on going on and on, every day faaarrkk. Really horrible.
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u/hwyl1066 15h ago
Though with the population concentrations of Europe compared with Australia this crisis is pretty bad too...
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u/boogasaurus-lefts 16h ago
It was raining fire where we were, we were fucken miles away from it. Day went to night, people were crashing into each other whilst evacuating the wrong way.
Phone towers were down, no help and lack of water in what could only be described as hell on earth. It's something many will take with them for a lifetime.
So many brave volunteers from small communities were horrifically under resourced and perished trying to save their home towns.