We all know too well just how severe this bushfire season. So severe that the coverage and celeb awareness has gone global. And according to the top dogs at NASA, the world is now set to experience the smoke effects of the bushfires first hand.
The fires in Australia are not just causing devastation locally. The unprecedented conditions that include searing heat combined with historic dryness, have led to the formation of an unusually large number of pyrocumulonimbus (pyrCbs) events. PyroCbs are essentially fire-induced thunderstorms. They are triggered by the uplift of ash, smoke, and burning material via super-heated updrafts. As these materials cool, clouds are formed that behave like traditional thunderstorms but without the accompanying precipitation. – NASA
With mountains of smoke entering the atmosphere, it’s believed that said smoke will do a full 360 lap of the earth. Originating on the East Coast of the country, and travel east essentially, eventually doing a full scale of the globe.
It’s pretty crazy to even think of what that actually looks like, but as you can see in the above little graph from NASA, it’s a worrying thing to look at.
We’ve already seen how bad the air quality is across Australia, particularly in Melbourne and Canberra over the past few days. Our buds in NZ have also experienced some of the worst air quality in their history. Even Chile experienced a tonne of haze thanks to the smoke travelling from Oz.
And obviously people are rightly pissed about how it’s managed to get this bad.
not normal at all. nasa has predicted that smoke from the bushfires will make a full circuit around the globe and come back to us. EVERYONE is affected. https://t.co/cTo7a2c9bp
— linee | AUS IS ON FIRE (@gldnfinelinee) January 14, 2020
“Over the past week, NASA satellites have observed an extraordinary amount of smoke injected into the atmosphere from the #AustralianFires…”
So Australia emissions _do_ matter on a global scale. What a surprise.https://t.co/jZFAMkopYe via @ABCNews #AustraliaBurning
— 💧Brendan Carton (@BrendanCarton) January 13, 2020
Bushfire smoke plume expected to lap the globe, NASA predicts – The world needs to know this name in terms of ignorant zealotry & bloody-minded arrogance #ScottMorrison who ignored all advice & brought the planet 2 the gates of hell #MorrisonFires #auspol https://t.co/zjAti22ySl
— 💧Terry Serio (@TerrySerio) January 13, 2020
