Environment Australia fires create plume of smoke wider than Europe as humanitarian crisis looms

[tom_mai78101]

Bushfires ravaging Australia have now killed at least 17 people and created a plume of smoke thought to be present over an area greater than that of Europe.

The government has deployed military ships and Navy ships and military aircraft were bringing water, food and fuel to towns where supplies were depleted and roads were cut off by the fires.

Authorities confirmed three bodies were found on Wednesday at Lake Conjola on the south coast of New South Wales. More than 175 homes have been destroyed in the region.

An area of thick smoke covering nearly 5.5 million sq km (2.1 million sq miles) has started drifting over the Pacific Ocean towards New Zealand.

Antti Lipponen, a physicist and research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, said the plume was 14 times the size of Japan, and superimposing it over a map of Europe, showed it would stretch from Iceland to Turkey.

Australia fires create plume of smoke wider than Europe as humanitarian crisis looms

People queue for hours for food with temperatures forecast to rise to danger levels again, in scenes likened to a war zone

www.independent.co.uk

 

[WildTurkey]

yep - smoke is a standard part of life now :/ The first day it was something crazy but it very quickly became normal. The concern is that these fires are much earlier than normal and we're just hitting our hottest/dry-est month now.

Also I heard Koalas may be functionally extinct due to the severity of the fires.