Fires in the Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has become much terrible in the first week of the month of September and its increasingly spreading to areas of untouched forest according to satellite data on Wednesday after the number of fires likely reached a 0-year high in August according to Reuters.
The country has reported some 8.474 fires in its portion of the Amazon rainforest for the first seven days of September which is the double number of fires in that same period just a year prior based on data from the Brazil’s national space research agency Inpe.
About 27% of the major fires in the month of September have been in the Virgin forest rather than the recently deforested areas or farmland where blazes are much more contained according to analysis of satellite images by U.S.-based non-profit organization, Amazon Conservation.
That’s up from 13% in August.
“It’s much more of this uncontrolled fire scenario that’s just being unleashed,” said Matt Finer, who leads the non-profit’s fire tracking project.
“These fires, we have no idea where it’s going to go, when it’s going to stop and as the dry season intensifies, it’s just going to get worse.”
The September’s own gas accounted for 53 major blazes per day in the first week of the month up from 18 a day in the previous month of August according to the aforementioned Amazon Conservation group.
The organization also defines major fires as those that emit enough smoke to indicate a large amount of biomass is burning whereas Inpe’s data is based on heat points which can as well detect small fires.
The Inpe figure showing fires doubled may be an underestimate because an issue with a NASA satellite caused partial data to be reported until Sept. 2, although the issue has been resolved in subsequent days, according to NASA and Inpe.
Revised Inpe data is expected to show fires increased to a 10-year high for August, even worse than the same month last year when Amazon fires provoked global outcry.
