Devastating forest fires have swept across Australia and are still spreading, with a large amount of smoke from the fires that can be seen from space.
According to the British "Daily Mail" reported on January 6, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) took shocking footage showing smoke billowing from the east coast of Australia, forming a cloud larger than the size of the continental United States.
On New Year's Day, images taken by the environmental detection satellite SuomiNPP showed billowing smoke before they merged into a giant clump that drifted across the ocean and spread across the southern hemisphere. The agency's GEOS-5 model, which calculated the density of black carbon particles produced by the fire, tracked the trajectory of the smoke cloud over a ten-day period.
A footage that began on New Year's Eve showed the wind blowing smoke eastward, through New Zealand and the South Pacific, before reaching South America more than 12,000 kilometers away in less than a week.
Bushfires in Australia have become so severe that last week smoke crossed the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. On Wednesday, winds blew smoke from the NSW and Victoria bushfires 2,000 kilometres eastward, enveloping settlements in New Zealand's South Island.
Satellite imagery shows that the entire South Island of New Zealand is shrouded in smoke and spreading towards the west coast of the North Island.
Photographs taken across New Zealand – Christchurch, Queenstown, Dunedin, Wanaka and Otago – show a thick haze in the sky. According to reports, Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, is now shrouded in yellow-brown smoke, covering the sky like "doomsday dusk". People commented on social media that Auckland at 2 p.m. was "rare and weird" as if the sun was about to set.
Winds carried smog from forest fires in NSW to Canberra on Monday, where air quality was the worst among major cities in the world. Australia's capital is shrouded in thick forest fire smoke, and civil affairs departments are asking staff to stay home. Staff in all positions were told to leave canberra headquarters for 48 hours, but some key staff will be working in other locations.
The Australian Environmental Protection Authority also documented "very poor" air quality in Melbourne's urban areas and attributed the smoke to bushfires in the state as well as in New South Wales and Tasmania.