Aug. 21, 2019 06:46AM EST
There are a record number
of wildfires burning
in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil's space
agency has said. Their smoke is visible from space and shrouded the city of São
Paulo in darkness for about an hour Monday afternoon, CBS news reported.
"It was as if the day had
turned into night," São Paulo resident Gianvitor Dias told BBC
News of the incident. "Everyone here commented, because even on rainy
days it doesn't usually get that dark. It was very impressive."
The darkening of São Paulo —
caused when wind carried smoke from fires burning 2,700 kilometers
(approximately 1,678 miles) away — focused international attention on the
fires, as the hashtag #prayforamazonia began to trend on Twitter.
Also on Monday, Brazil's
National Institute for Space Research (INPE) announced that a record number of
fires were burning in the world's largest rainforest, Al Jazeera reported. The agency said that it had spotted
nearly 73,000 fires in the Brazilian Amazon since January, up 83 percent from
the year before. Satellite images have turned up more than 9,500 new fires
since Thursday alone.
The fires also showed up on
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite imagescaptured Aug. 11 and 13. The U.S. agency
said that fire activity in the Amazon had actually been below average this
year. While it was above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it was
below average in Mato Grosso and Pará.
Smoke from Amazon wildfires
captured in a satellite image Aug. 13.
NASA Earth Observatory
The state of Amazonas declared
an emergency for its south and its capital Manaus on Aug. 9, Reuters reported. The state of Acre, on Brazil's border
with Peru, declared an environmental alert Friday.
Wildfires in the Amazon, which
is an important sink for carbon dioxide, have been increasing in recent years
due to the climate crisis and deforestation, The Washington Post reported.
The uptick in the total number
of fires this year also coincides with the election of far-right
President Jair Bolsonaro, who has promised to open more of the Amazon
to mining and farming. While fires are common during the dry season, they can
also be started illegally to clear land for cattle, and the INPE said the high
number of fires this year could not be blamed exclusively on the climate.
"There is nothing
abnormal about the climate this year or the rainfall in the Amazon region,
which is just a little below average," INPE researcher Alberto Setzer told
Reuters.
But Bolsonaro rejected the
idea that his policies could be to blame. He argued that this was the time of
year called the queimada, when farmers clear their land with fire.
"I used to be called
Captain Chainsaw. Now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame. But it is the
season of the queimada," he told reporters, according to Reuters.
The figures from INPE come
weeks after Bolsonaro fired the agency's director after the agency published
dramatic deforestation data that Bolsonaro claimed was false, BBC
News reported. INPE had said that deforestation had increased 88 percent in
June 2019 when compared to the year before. INPE says its data is 95 percent
accurate.
Amazon Deforestation Rate Hits
3 Football Fields Per Minute, Date Confirms http://dlvr.it/R98JsX #Amazon #Deforestation #Trees
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