- About 10,000 of the 2019 fires have started in the past couple of weeks .
- On Monday, the smoke plume from the fires darkened the sky above So Paulo, one of Brazil's coastal cities, which is more than 2,000 miles away from the blazes.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .
ADVERTISEMENT
Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil's largest city, 2,000 miles away
The Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate: The Brazilian Amazon has experienced more than 74,000 fires this year , whereas last year's total was around 40,000.
sao paolo brazil dark skies fires
ADVERTISEMENT
Recommended articles
Starting around 3:00 p.m. local time on Monday, the skies above Brazil's largest city went dark.
The sun in So Paulo had been eclipsed not by the moon, but by a vast cloud of smoke that choked the coastal city.
The duvet of daytime darkness was a result of the nearly 10,000 new forest fires that started across Brazil, primarily in the Amazon basin, in the past week. Many of the blazes are more than 2,000 miles away from So Paulo, but strong winds and a mass of cold air moved thegrey plume of smoke across the country.
ADVERTISEMENT
This year so far, scientists have recorded more than 74,000 fires in Brazil. That's nearly double 2018's total of about 40,000 fires. The surge marks an 83% increase in wildfires over the same period in 2018, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reported . The largest state in Brazil, Amazonas, declared a state of emergency on Monday.
Already, 2019 has the highest number of fires observed in Brazil in a single year since researchers began keeping track in 2013 and there are still four months to go.
amazonas amazon forest fires
Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
It just kept getting darker and darker
ADVERTISEMENT
The smoke plumes from the fires raging in the Amazon initially spread from the state of Amazonas to the nearby states of Par and Mato Grosso. Then, pushed by weather, the smoke clouds converged and drifted towards the Atlantic coast, arriving in So Paulo on Monday afternoon.
"I thought we were about to get hit with a heavy storm, but instead of raining it just kept getting darker and darker," Marcus Mendes, a Sao Paulo resident who videoed the event, told AccuWeather .
Darkened skies Sao Paolo Brazil Amazon Fires
Andre Lucas/Getty
The video that Mendes shared with Accuweather showed various parts of So Paulo under the cover of darkness. After about 40 minutes, Mendes said, rain started falling and light started filtering through the gloom.
"When I posted the video online, people asked me if there had been an eclipse," he added.
ADVERTISEMENT
Other people in So Paulo took to social media to share their photos of the skies.
One tweet from Beyond the Shadows, a democracy advocacy group in Brazil, showed cars stuck in city traffic with their headlights on. It looked like it could be 9:00 p.m. in the evening, but the image was posted at 3:37 p.m.
Climatempo, a local news outlet, reported that winds pushed the smoke plumes to the southeast. The smoke then joined an existing band of fog and low-lying clouds that a mass of cold air had suspended above So Paulo.
1.2 million square miles of smoke
In total, the blazes in the Brazilian Amazonhave created a layer of smoke estimated to be 1.2 million square miles wide. This image from the European Union's Copernicus Satellite shows the smoke slicing north to south through the rest of the country like a knife.
ADVERTISEMENT
This isn't the first time the Amazon has experienced thousands of fires simultaneously. Typically, the dry season in the rainforest runs from July to October, during which blazes can spark from natural sources like lightning. But summer is also the time of year when Brazilian farmers and loggers purposefully set fires to clear swaths of trees for industrial or agricultural use.
This year, however, w armer temperatures and drier conditions due, in part, to climate change have allowed both deliberate burns and blazes that crop up naturally to grow bigger than they otherwise might have.
"There are always fires this time of the year," Santiago Gass, a NASA researcher, told news outlet UOL Noticias . "But the smoke corridor doesn't form every year."
See Also:
ADVERTISEMENT
- Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
- Brazils president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
- The Amazon is burning at a rate not seen since we started keeping track. The smoke is reaching cities 2,000 miles away.
SEE ALSO: The 'lungs of the planet' are in danger of reaching a tipping point that could turn the Amazon rainforest into a savannah
FOLLOW BUSINESS INSIDER AFRICA
ADVERTISEMENT
Recommended articles
Best live dealer casino: Top USA live casinos online
Best real money online casinos USA: Top 10 casino sites in 2024
OPEC excited about partnership with Namibia
The US loses to Russia and China in popularity across Africa
Top 10 most valuable South African brands in 2024
Africa's giants play tug of war for the top economic spot
Morocco is making giant strides to become Africa's aviation manufacturing hub
Hackers test their ransomwares in less protected regions like Africa before striking richer nations: Report
