There Is a Large Wildfire Burning. In Greenland.
The Greenland fire evolution since July 29 as captured by @ESA_EO ‘s #sentinel2 pic.twitter.com/Iuk9blyui9
— Stef Lhermitte (@StefLhermitte) August 9, 2017
This is going to sound weird, but there’s a wildfire right now in west Greenland. You know, that huge island of mostly ice? Part of it is on fire.
There’s been nothing even close to this since reliable satellite-based fire detection records began in Greenland in 2000. Very small wildfires can evade satellite detection, and old-timer scientists who have worked in Greenland for decades say that micro-fires there aren’t necessarily uncommon.
This week’s fire, however, is on another level.
“This is the largest wildfire we know of,” says Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Technische Universiteit in Delft, Netherlands, who did some of the initial mapping of the fire. “For a lot of people, it’s been a bit of discovery on the go.” The fire was first spotted by local aircraft on July 31.
More: Greenland, the land of ice and snow, is burning | Grist