Amazon forest burns
1987 • Amazon
"The skies over western Brazil will soon be dark both day and night." - Eugene Linden, journalist Between July and October of 1987, satellites observed 4% of the Amazon forest region engulfed in unprecedented fire. In Brazil alone, the fires covered 77,000 square miles, "an area one and a half times the size of New York State. Of these, at least 30,000 square miles were newly felled virgin forest ... [the remainder] involved regrown forest on previously cleared land, savannas and fields." The fires were caused by farmers and cattle ranchers during the annual dry season land clearing.
Eugene Linden, "Torching the Amazon: Can the Rain Forest Be Saved?", Time Magazine, 18 September 1989. Marlise Simons, "Vast Amazon Fires, Man-Made, Linked To Global Warming," The New York Times, 12 August 1988. Additional source: Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2000), 452.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) data from NASA EOSDIS, and data from the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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