San Diego County Looks Like Mars After Fire
San Diego County Looks Like Mars After Fire
21 May 2014
published by http://time.com
USA — Wildfires have transformed San Diego countryside into an otherworldly landscape
Fires ravaged San Diego County last week, charring more than 26,000 acres of drought-parched brush and dozens of homes and buildings in the process. A combination of unseasonable triple-digit temperatures, extremely low humidity and hot winds blowing in from the desert stoked the blazes, kicking off what promises to be a historically destructive wildfire season.
We get extreme fire behavior every 10 years and the drought doesnt help. This is very odd for the month of May to have these types of fires, Cal Fire Capt. Richard Cordova told TIME on Saturday.
The fires left the countryside looking like the barren wastes of a pock-marked planet. Here, satellite imagery taken after the Camp Pendleton fire shows an otherworldly scene more like the surface of Mars than California.
Botany Bay, relatively level ground on the surface of Mars between Cape York and Solander Point, taken by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance orbiter on July 7, 2013.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
The aftermath of the wildfire at the Camp Pendleton Marine Base in San Diego County, Calif., on on May 15, 2014.
DigitalGlobe/Getty Images
