Fires and Thick Smoke over South America
Fires and Thick Smoke over South America
25 September 2007
Across the southwestern Amazon Basin, fires were burning in both Bolivia and Brazil when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra satellite passed overhead on 22 September 2007. Over the course of the day, fire activity usually picks up, often creating so much smoke that little of the land surface is visible in images from satellites that pass over in the afternoon.
TERRA
22 September 2007
This image, captured at 10:25 a.m. local time, shows the widespread deforestation of the Amazon in the area. Because people use fire to clear and manage agricultural land, it is not uncommon for fires to escape control and burn accidentally into adjacent forest areas, causing degradation and heightening the risk of future fires. This unintentional burning has the potential to transform large areas of the southern Amazon from forest into savanna.
The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel.
(source: EarthObservatory)
