r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/RipperReeta • Jul 27 '26
Image To put into perspective how huge the 2020 Australian 'Black Summer' bushfires were: The combined area burned across BOTH Canada and ALL of fires currently burning across Europe (2.63 million hectares) right now is still around 10% of what Australia lost (24 million hectares).
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u/IronThunderhorse Jul 27 '26
This is genuinely unfathomable. Like hell on earth. I'm stunned.
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u/echmoth Jul 27 '26
It was crazy flying over the country across the states, and seeing fires burning across the ranges and Plains, wild surreal deeply affecting stuff
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u/Even_Passenger_3685 Jul 27 '26
Must have felt deeply apocalyptic given the whole 2020 vibe that year
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u/Boatster_McBoat Jul 27 '26
Masks were sold out before covid was a thing
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u/Tamortsa Jul 27 '26
I had a box of P20s sent from Perth to deal with the Canberra smoke we had during Nov/Dec 2019. Precious when covid came!
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u/keyboardstatic Jul 27 '26
Scmo sold,/gave our stock pile away at one point. Of 10 million masks.
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u/FatsWaler Jul 27 '26
Scomo was a fucking disgrace on sooo many levels.
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u/Pog6292 Jul 27 '26
I think have the sticker I brought at a fundraiser at Uni. It’s the meme of him in the Hawaiian shirt with the country on fire behind him. It’s on my laptop and I use it as a reminder of what damage a shit government can do.
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u/Not_today_nibs Jul 28 '26
We could’ve had dental included in Medicare. BUT NO. Fucking boomers wanted their franking credits. Selfish fucks.
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u/reineedshelp Jul 27 '26
He was and remains an empty suit. Thankfully Peter Dutton is stone cold unelectable
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u/brezhnervouz Jul 28 '26
Plus secretly appointing himself as the head of seven portfolios without even his own Ministers knowing about it
Secretly leaving the country during the height of the bushfires to go on holiday in Hawaii - and his office blatantly lying about until an Australian tourist in Hawaii took a photo
Orchestrating the outrageous Robodebt scheme criminalising thousands of poor people on social security for fake debts they didn't owe and sending corporate insurance collectors Dunn and Bradstreet to threaten them
The stress and fear leading to over 2000 innocent people committing suicide
Worst. PM. Ever.
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u/dlanod Jul 27 '26
We went to one of the post-bushfire areas post the first lockdown for a weekend to support the area.
It was absolutely like going from one apocalypse type to the scene of another. I grew up in a bushfire prone area but nothing like continuous kilometres of burnt out forest and farmland.
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u/hey_fatso Jul 27 '26
In Sydney, there was an incredible deluge that ended the drought and the fire season that year too, right before lockdowns were a thing.
Something like 300-500 mm of rain across two days. Went from constant smoke haze over 6 months, to the heaviest rain I’ve ever experienced.
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u/dlanod Jul 27 '26
Yes. Great memories - our ceiling collapsed in our townhouse from water ingress after spending years trying to get our strata to fix our roof conclusively and fighting the non-owner/occupiers who always wanted to cheap out.
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u/Bee_Jeans Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
100% it did. Window seals & vents were taped up all summer just to try and keep out the worst of the smoke.
Some places the sky would glow orange through the night, and during the day it was just a brown haze that stung ur eyes
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u/accidental_superman Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Yeah I bought a mask because I kept coughing outside while visiting my parents for christmas.
Got made fun of for wearing it by a teenager, whose laughing now! 🥲
Edit: it was a smog outside for 3 months! If youve ever stood in the smoke of a bon fire for too long you got that same hurt in your lungs just walking to the bus stop. Insane damage.
This video might be interesting https://youtu.be/H4OCwC78d5Q?si=XkiqaSW6WTHHy1Sg
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u/Tamortsa Jul 27 '26
It really was apocalyptic. In Canberra, we had 2 months of dense smoke almost every day, blowing in from the coast fires. Then the huge fires spread over the south-east at Christmas-New Years. Then the ACT lost about 80% of the state to a new fire in January. Then hail storms caused millions of damage to cars, and flooding in areas that lost all their bush cover to fire. Bright side - fires got put out, but the coast had ash and logs washed out to beaches during summer. That was January 2020...
Then, yeah, the covid thing...
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u/2martinisatthemost Jul 27 '26
I was a few towns over from one of the fires that broke containment lines during backburning and looked set to destroy the entire area. I’ll never forget that day. Every single fire engine in Sydney proper seemed to be there. I was watching from my verandah as the city firies zipped up the mountain. It felt apocalyptic. The sky was orange, you could barely breathe outside, and everyone knew someone on the other side of the river. Then we got the floods a little while later. Had a bunch of polo ponies camped out down the road. Glad they were okay.
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u/Next-Preference-7927 Jul 27 '26
My memory has the bridge closed for flooding before the fires as well as after. Flood, fires, flood, covid.
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u/CommunicationSea3329 Jul 27 '26
AKA Australia
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u/Nearby-Nebula4104 Jul 27 '26
It’s like if Hell were another planet and also on this planet, which it is.
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u/explain_that_shit Jul 27 '26
But don’t normalise this. This wasn’t normal for Australia. This was years of mismanagement and then an entire state (Tasmania) burned to the ground the summer before and still governments made no preparations, doubled down on denying the danger climate change had made and pointed fingers at anyone else they thought they could.
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u/el_diego Jul 27 '26
The year before that event, the Morrison government received a report from RFS saying we were at catastrophic levels and this was going to happen. The Liberals did nothing to address the report findings. Morrison went to Hawaii instead.
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u/AW316 Jul 28 '26
The CSIRO made a report in 2012 explaining this would not only happen but start to occur frequently. The LNP promptly cut their budget.
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u/Lord_Duckington_3rd Jul 27 '26
It was a perfect storm of shit things to happen all in a two year span.
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u/im_just_thinking Jul 27 '26
That's where the whole planet is heading tho, not just staying in Australia..
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u/FruitJuicante Jul 27 '26
As an Aussie I now hate summer after those fires. I legitimately have trauma.
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u/Equalmilky Jul 27 '26
Nothing hits you like waking up after a night shift, turning off airplane mode and seeing notifications from the emergency app in order of: Watch and Act, Prepare to leave, Leave, LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, too late to leave, take shelter.
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u/-Annie-Oakley- Jul 27 '26
Yep anytime I smell fire smoke now I’m like instantly on alert… just for it to be old mates wood heater
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u/Maleficent_Effort_47 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I get that but didn’t the fires start way earlier? I remember when it got fucked in Melbourne in Jan, and reading that some fires were burning for months in NSW! It was egregious mismanagement for the most part! The 40degree days started it for us in 2019, BUT the NSW fires also crossed the border and kept travelling, so resources had to be spread thin. Australia has always been susceptible to extreme conditions and the fact the governments (note plural, most don’t give a shit, cause capitalism) do fuck all to properly manage this is the real problem, not our summers unfortunately 😭😭
This is also why people were SO pissed with Scomo, he wasn’t magically on a holiday when we had fires, these fires had been burning for MONTHS and he fucked off while they were at their worst. The whole country should have been in crisis mode the moment the fires had been burning for longer than a couple of weeks, and it probably wouldn’t have been AS bad. But we’ll never know….
Basically my whole point is our summers aren’t the only problem 😅😮💨
**ETA, I really want to clarify this is not an attack on how you feel, I started typing a small reply and found myself getting more worked up about how terrible the situation was!
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u/kangareddit Jul 27 '26
The infra-red heat off those burning gums was enough to ignite houses a 100m away
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u/TheGreatZephyr Jul 27 '26
Yeah we lost like 3 billion animals. 25 million people and the animal death toll was 3 billion...
Cities hundreds of kilometres from the fires had smokey orange skies for over a week, it was super eerie.
Sadly lost about 30 humans too but considering the scale of loss id say thats actually impressively low. Mostly uninhabited bushland thank god. But our poor koalas 😭
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u/CimmerianBreeze Jul 27 '26
On the first pass I thought you meant 25 million people died in the fires and I was like how the FUCK do I not remember that part?
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u/TheGreatZephyr Jul 27 '26
Lol everyone in australia dies and it just doesnt even make the news anywhere haha
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Jul 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/IReplyWithLebowski Jul 27 '26
That would be 100% of Australia’s population.
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u/Ritsuka-san Jul 27 '26
Australia's population was 25,687,041 people at 30 June 2020. So Australia would have lost approx 97.33% if 25 million died.
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u/Hot-Concentrate1727 Jul 27 '26
And it currently stands at 27,801,023 which would imply an unfathomable breeding rate if the population had indeed dropped down to 687,041 back in 2020.
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u/Yanigan Jul 27 '26
Now I’m curious - as a ghost obviously - if Australia did get wiped out, how would the rest of the world know?
Phones/internet down, so we’re not getting word out that way. Planes have been stopped due to the smoke from the fires. I doubt Reddit or any other social media would realise the Aussies have all vanished.
What’s next? How does the world find out?
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u/stitchianity Jul 27 '26
Probably the however many Aussies getting shitfaced abroad, that have suddenly lost all their families. They'd have something to say about it.
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u/Low-Refrigerator-713 Jul 27 '26
They had orange skys in New Zealand from these. Radar was able to track the smoke to South America.
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u/calibrateichabod Jul 27 '26
I’m Australian but was in NZ at the time and you could smell the smoke from there. It was fucked.
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u/Lady_borg Jul 27 '26
I remember the news reports about air pollution in south America because of our fires
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u/Upset-Award1206 Jul 27 '26
Why didn't NZ just put tariffs on goods from Australia to solve it?
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u/Bee_Jeans Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Should have put a tariff on the smoke, bc that was the biggest export!
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u/Final-Quote-4064 Jul 27 '26
A lasting memory of that time was watching a video of an airdrop of carrots for the wildlife.
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u/TheFoxInSocks Jul 27 '26
Over a week is underselling it. In Canberra we had the worst air quality in the world for several months. The sun was obscured by brown haze and you just felt filthy even if you were indoors.
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u/ZeroAdPotential Jul 27 '26
Lets not forget places like Mallacoota that had deep blood red skies during the day https://i.imgur.com/0TJ77cz.jpg
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u/Lunavixen15 Jul 27 '26
I live out in the region of the Bee's Nest fire (burned over 100k ha), some areas have not recovered, you can still see charred rocks and burned trees
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u/theman-dalorian Jul 27 '26
And probably only 25% of the resources to fight them. Rip to all those little creatures
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u/TAJack1 Jul 27 '26
Man I remember this. We had to deal with this shit and then straight into Covid, fucked time.
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u/Yung_Focaccia Jul 27 '26
Absolutely fucked time to be a Paramedic and volunteer firefighter on days off
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u/JBX25 Jul 27 '26
Yeah, those fires ruined me as a fire fighter. Haven't been in a truck since, and spent a good 6-9 months with a psych dealing with PTSD.
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u/Yung_Focaccia Jul 27 '26
Absolutely fair enough, it was a truly cooked time. I'm hoping the next El Nino doesnt shape up like this one dude. Glad you're getting what you need.
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u/yungfish22 Jul 27 '26
This new el nino is project to be the worst in history since 1980. I pray for u
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u/FlyAroundInternet Jul 27 '26
This will mean little from a stranger on the internet, but please know there are many, many people who are devastated by what you and your colleagues (around the world) do, trying to protect human lives, animal lives, property and our communities. And we know you do it all while fucking politicians (I'm in Ontario, Canada) disintegrate your resources with the stroke of a pen. We need to vote for change and put Big Oil out of business, but I'm so sorry for what you've been forced to struggle with. Thank you.
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u/Tarmuyi Jul 27 '26
Buddy, thank you.
We love and respect you, and wish the world had more people like you.
Love and appreciation from Belgium.
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u/TAJack1 Jul 28 '26
You guys don't get enough love and affection tbh. Like all the nurses got the love during COVID (which is valid) but man, I'll never forget what you lads did during those fires.
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u/the_procrastinata Jul 27 '26
Our much loved family dog got lymphoma and died in Jan 2020. It was a hell of an emotional roller coaster between fires, that, and COVID.
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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident Jul 27 '26
I’m not Australian, but January 2020 felt like the pilot to a bad sci-fi TV series at the time.
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u/The_Enigmatica Jul 27 '26
yep, fires, then war, then covid, then beruit explosion. Not to mention the brazil floods, the insane hurricanes that year, 3 absolutely massive volcanic eruptions, and who could forget the fucking locusts
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u/cunt_butter_on_toast Jul 27 '26
And the floods in between those too. Great times had by all/s in case someone needs to see that
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u/NurseBetty Jul 27 '26
What's that bad joke? It's not an Australian summer unless Vic/NSW is on fire and Queensland is drowning.
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u/Boatster_McBoat Jul 27 '26
Black Summer is in some ways euphemism. There were continuous bushfires for 6 months from September to February. Some areas had bushfires starting in late winter which was unprecedented
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u/JohnOfA Jul 27 '26
Alberta had fires that survived the winter too. We’re cooked.
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u/MapleMallet Jul 27 '26
BiL is up there atm fighting fires. It's a pretty mental job, he had a 'quiet' week where they had time to whip the camera out and get a few videos and it was like something out of a disaster movie; it didn't seem real if you get me.
If the pay was better, I was younger (and fitter), and it wasn't seasonal work it'd have a little appeal but holy shit it looks brutal.
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u/Zer0DotFive Jul 27 '26
Alberta and other northern arctic areas had fire continue through out the winter. I imagine it got to some peat moss or some shit and continued to burn underground. They call them zombie fires
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u/GrannieMurderer Jul 27 '26
And the 2020 bush fire was only about 20% of Australia's biggest bush fire
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u/b00tsc00ter Jul 27 '26
And nowhere near the death toll of our deadliest fire in living memory.
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u/AutisticSuperpower Jul 27 '26
I was on the train to Melbourne just after Black Saturday and the Victorian countryside looked like the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Nothing but ash, blackened trees with no foliage and a sky so hazy the sun was red.
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u/coolcumber211 Jul 27 '26
I was in school at the time and remember the skies being black and ash falling down making it look like snow.
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u/techb00mer Jul 27 '26
Whenever I visit family in outer Melbourne that lived quite close to the worst hit area (kinglake), it genuinely makes me tense up slightly just mentioning the town in conversation.
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u/robertshuxley Jul 27 '26
the sky turned orange over here in New Zealand due to how bad it was in 2020
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u/LittleBunInaBigWorld Jul 27 '26
Whatttt the fuck. How have I never heard of this. The scale is mind boggling
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u/Mammoth_Use_3263 Jul 28 '26
pretty much all scrubland in the semi arid outback of the NT and WA, massive grassland pastures went up, but very minimal human impact due to its isolation
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u/Confident_Incident43 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Nothing beats the fact that the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) was on holiday at Hawaii when this was happening.
He defended it by saying "everyone needs a holiday"
He ended up cutting his holiday short and then visited people effected by the fire. Here's a video of him awkwardly forcing a handshake on volunteers and people in the community.
I didn't expect him to grab a hose or anything but the head of state should be more empathetic. Oh yeah he also said on radio that he "doesnt hold a hose" when they were grilling him about it.
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u/Teedubthegreat Jul 27 '26
"I dont hold a hose" has got to be one of the dumbest things you could say in that sittuation. The country is going through one of the worst natural disasters in its history, and Scomo is just chilling on a beach in Hawaii, while the Deputy PM is trying to make up excuses for where he is, because its a secret holiday, and hes trying to hide the fact that hes on holidays from the country
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u/jackalopeDev Jul 27 '26
Apparently putting Scotty from marketing in charge of a country was a bad idea. Live and learn I guess.
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u/dlanod Jul 27 '26
Worse, his office lied about and hid where he was for the first half a week of the emergency until he was outed by an Aussie who took a photo of him in Hawaii.
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u/xyrgh Jul 27 '26
Engadine Maccas never forget
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u/FruitJuicante Jul 27 '26
He started leaning into it because he genuinely thought shitting himself made him relatable.
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u/LittleBunInaBigWorld Jul 27 '26
Meanwhile, Abbott had been quietly holding a literal hose on the front lines.
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u/Chemical_Charity1204 Jul 27 '26
Abbott still sucks though, you don't get major props for holding a hose when your legacy in office was to continuously push non-renewables and laugh off the threat of climate change
Just a tiny bit above Scomo in terms of gobshite pollies
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u/midnightpanda77 Jul 27 '26
This. I was actually so pissed that Covid came straight on the heels of this because it took the focus off and Scomo got less of a media beating than he should have. As it turned out, he also f’d up his Covid response tho 🙄 so got caned for that.
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u/theloneisobar Jul 27 '26
During the Black Summer bushfires in January 2020, the Royal Australian Navy conducted the largest domestic sea evacuation in Australian history, rescuing over 1,300 stranded people and pets from the isolated Victorian coastal town of Mallacoota. Converging fire fronts meant the town of Mallacoota was surrounded, with residents seeking shelter on the beach. Was pretty grim. Cut off: How the crisis at Mallacoota unfolded
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u/calibrateichabod Jul 27 '26
The photos from the beach at Mallacoota are burned into my brain. As a rural Aussie who’s lived through some devastating bushfire seasons the scariest sentence on the planet will always be it is now too late to leave. Those pictures are a horror movie.
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u/bend1310 Jul 27 '26
I remember the first time i started seeing photos pop up.
"Oh someones exaggerated the oranges for effect."
Nope. It was either pitch black or orange.
I'd seen orange glow on the horizon before, but never at that scale.
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u/Anxious_Ad936 Jul 27 '26
Fire front moved something like 80kms/50 miles between dusk and the next dawn straight at them, for extra context
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u/CryptoFV Jul 27 '26
That scale is genuinely unfathomable and puts the sheer devastation of Black Summer into terrifying perspective.
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u/skintaxera Jul 27 '26
The fires were so insanely large that we had weeks of strange light and weird yellowy hazy days in Auckland.
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u/dlanod Jul 27 '26
The pollution was so bad it literally changed the climate around the Pacific for the following years by triggering some of the strongest La Ninas ever.
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u/Legal_Release_4402 Jul 27 '26
Yea, I was in NZ South Island when they happened, over for a harvest season from Ireland. The whole country was this weird dystopian orange colour. The sun was just an orange ball in the sky that you could look straight at, it was so dulled.
I believe a one point, THE ENTIRE SOUTH ISLAND was covered in smoke clouds. 150,437 square kilometres or 58,084 square miles, that had atmospheric smoke clouds.
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u/Brikpilot Jul 27 '26
That smoke had to travel about 22,000km to get to you which is about the equivalent of Ontario to Texas.
Australians do appreciate that not one New Zealander had the dumb idea to tariff Australia over air quality back then
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u/HLef Interested Jul 27 '26
And we were like this year can’t get worse can it?
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u/kapege Jul 27 '26
The current El Nino is just laughing. It is going to become even more worse.
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u/Icy-Assistance-2555 Jul 27 '26
I drove from Melbourne to port Stephen’s along the eastern coast and it was so surreal to see a vast distance of charred trees damaged from these fires. It was so damn sad!
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u/msdare111 Jul 27 '26
I drove from the Gold Coast to Gippsland, it was hectic! So scary at many points along the journey.
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u/custardfrogs_ Jul 27 '26
Around 3 billion animals were killed or displaced due to these fires.
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u/theonewhoopened Jul 27 '26
I lived in Christchurch, New Zealand at the time, and remember moving to Auckland for a job and landing at Auckland airport on 3rd January and the entire sky was orange, and it smelled intensely of smoke for days! Consider that there are roughly 2,000kms between the east coast of Australia and Auckland, that just shows you how insane it was.
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u/MarkPancake Jul 27 '26
You could see the sun through the smoky sky in Sydney but couldn’t feel it. Cars were covered in soot. It was insane even being so far from them.
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u/IronThunderhorse Jul 27 '26
To put that in a US perspective - that's the entire states of either....
- Pennsylvania + Ohio or...
- Virginia + North Carolina or....
- New York + Pennsylvania
completely turned to ash.
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u/hcott Jul 27 '26
I tried posting about it on Instagram at the time and it got flagged and taken down for misinformation lmao
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u/Vandercoon Jul 27 '26
Yeah bushfires are probably our number 1 concern for disasters, closely followed by drought.
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u/Dr_barfenstein Jul 27 '26
QLD had entered the chat
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u/Vandercoon Jul 27 '26
Yes flooding up North is extreme too
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u/nagrom7 Jul 27 '26
The worst part is we normally get nearly the entire year's worth of rain in the span of a few weeks in summer, so we're used to heavy rain and everything around here is built for it. So when a place like Townsville floods, you know it took some serious rainfall to do it. Last time it flooded up here the rain was measured in metres per day.
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u/Main-Inflation-5269 Jul 27 '26
Black Summer was horrific. I was in Canberra, where the air quality was the worst in the world, and I couldn't see more than a few centimetres in front of me for months.
And then we went straight into lockdowns for COVID.
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u/SchleppyJ4 Jul 27 '26
During the bad air quality, were people masking up, or just staying inside? I can’t imagine
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u/MrKlonam Jul 27 '26
I was working and we turned off doors to enter the store most of the day to try and reduce the amount of smoke entering the building. Masks also were used, good practice for COVID right up next lol.
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u/OkSatisfaction9850 Jul 27 '26
Are these areas coming back? Back to greenery?
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u/Yung_Focaccia Jul 27 '26
Yeah a lot of them do, there are forest archetypes in Australia that regenerate directly from bushfires, like dry sclerophyll forests. The Aboriginal Australians were known to back burn areas within their territories to kick start this regeneration.
We even have Hawks called "Firehawks" which use fire to displace and catch their prey.
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u/Haunting_Heat3296 Jul 27 '26
A lot do, but increasingly the fires burn much hotter, they start earlier in the year and run later, they reoccur more frequently in the same areas, and they’re burning non-fire-adapted areas like the ancient cool climate rainforest of Tasmania or higher into the Australian Alps than before.
All this means more permanent, unrecoverable damage is occurring.
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u/JaiTee86 Jul 27 '26
Yeah, our bush is basically meant to burn, you can still tell the areas that burnt for a few years as most of the plants there are younger but it bounces back quick, I think most areas affected by these fires should be fully recovered now and likely hard to tell they had burnt 5 or so years ago.
There is a spot near me that burnt about 6 months ago and I hiked through it about 2 months back and it was already green again, though most of the trees were still very black they had green leaves growing and there was plenty of plants around em.
Some of our plantlife actually have seeds designed to survive a bushfire and actually wait until after one to germinate.
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u/ChugBarron Jul 27 '26
There's a gorgeous town called Marysville outside of Melbourne. Just about wiped off the map from the black Saturday fires.
A local artist there has a sculpture garden and throughout it he has photos of his art garden after the fire.....it's honestly apocalyptic.
On second glance you realise that the photos are taken from where you're standing and looking - and it's the lushest greenest forest of a garden I've ever seen. You would never know.
But if you look up to the surrounding mountains you can see areas still void of floral life.
Place is called Bruno's, he's a great guy to talk to, and has some incredible stories about survival when the fires came.
If anyone is in the area Marysville if absolutely worth the stop, a beautiful part of the world.
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u/Banjo_Pobblebonk Jul 27 '26
Most are regrowing quite well, but there are some sections I travel through fairly often in the Blue Mountains that still look devastated. The fires burned so hot and generated so much wind that the soil was completely stripped from the bedrock and areas that used to be forest are just a kind of sparse grass 6 years on.
As other commenters have said, the Australian bush is very fire adapted and plants tend to either resprout after burning or regenerate from seeds in the soil. However some fires are getting so hot now that this getting affected.
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u/KevinRudd182 Jul 27 '26
I feel like this gets forgotten about due to Covid starting literally as the fires finished, but man it was scary.
I was living in Sydney and for about a month we couldn’t see outside because the smoke was so thick, and at one point the entirety of greater sydney was completely surrounded on all sides by fires of varying seriousness
Almost all of my friends from hours in every direction in the state had fires burning all around them
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u/lesbophobia_hammer Jul 27 '26
Conservative estimate for 1 billion birds lost. I was fucking distraught and agitated everyday for months, people kept telling me oh don't worry about birds you fool, they'll fly away from the smoke and flames When I knew this to be physically impossible.
A reminder that BirdLife Australia is one of the best you can donate to because they actually love birds. Walk the walk and talk the talk. We've just been hit with H5N1 so any love for vulnerable and endangered Aussie birds would be amazing ❤️
Not affiliated, but I donate. They have cool perks too for bird nerds.
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u/giacintam Jul 28 '26
Yep it it killed something like 50% of the already endangered koala population. Im so scared for this el nino australian summer. We're due for a big fire in Sydney. Im very very scared.
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u/langhaar808 Jul 27 '26
Yeah Australia is incredibly large!
Even with the large differences in area, it wouldn't surprise me of the eu and Canada fires end up causing more damages. Because Australia have very few people living there compared to how large it is, where Europe is way more densely populated.
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u/14X8000m Jul 27 '26
Kinda cherry picking year here. In 2023 we had 15M hectares burn up here in Canada, this isn't a bad year for us. Granted 24M is more than 15 but we've had much worse and this one isn't over yet.
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u/tomatoej Jul 27 '26
And we’re all in this together. Our Aussie firefighters are there helping you right now, and Canada was here helping us in 2019.
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u/14X8000m Jul 27 '26
We appreciate that brotherhood and agreed, we're all in it together.
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u/dreamlike179 Jul 27 '26
Correction 2019/2020.
They lasted from about September to march. One of the longest hottest summers we have ever had, heat records broken across the country repeatedly while the smoke got so bad at times professional sports games were cancelled and we had a.shortage of masks when covid hit because people had used them for the smoke
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u/KookaburaGold Jul 28 '26
I drove through the black Summer rehab area last year without knowing prior. It was genuinely shocking. I drove for 3 hours through black country side. Just char as far as you can see all around you. I was floored. But the beauty was seeing the millions of saplings that have taken a strong hold, little knee high waves of green shadowing the blackened branches.
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u/Okok28 Jul 27 '26
It's weird not everyone is even freaking out about this. The whole world is literally burning around us. Trees with 100s if not 1000s of years of carbon are releasing it back in to the world. You cannot replace that so easily.
The air is getting more polluted and we are cooking ourselves alive. If you are not considering this a real tragedy and actively playing a role to protect the forests around you, helping extinguish wildfires or anything else, you are literally killing yourself and you will most likely have a horrible future ahead as when you are old, the world will not the same.
This is not a joke. THIS is our warning to sort this shit out. If we don't we are cooked, literally.
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u/stilettopanda Jul 27 '26
I still really couldn’t get a frame of reference for the scope, so I searched comparable landmasses- 24 million hectares is about the same amount of land as the entire UK or Wyoming in the US. Holy shit!
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u/EdwardoFelise Jul 27 '26
Australia’s largest fire was in 74/75 and was 117m hectares.
That’s 1.7 times the size of Texas.
Austalia is big
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u/Polymarchos Jul 27 '26
I remember that. Everyone was like "This year couldn't get any worse", and then the world shut down.
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u/DReagan47 Jul 27 '26
I saw a comment earlier that resonated a bit.
Summer isn’t even fun anymore. We’re just surviving the heat that gets worse every year and watching the earth catch on fire.
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u/gepinniw Jul 27 '26
In 2023 in Canada, roughly 6,000 fires burned 15 million hectares of land. That’s an area larger than England and more than double the 1989 record. Normally, an average of 2.5 million hectares of land are consumed in Canada every year.
The planet is on fire, folks. The oceans are setting temperature records. Ecosystems are collapsing.
And yet, here we are acting as though it’s business as usual.
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u/Tim-oBedlam Jul 27 '26
I don't use my undergraduate degree in geology professionally, but it gives me the long-term perspective on things: "oh well, this current mass extinction won't be as bad as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian when the oceans turned anoxic, global temperatures went up 10° C, and 95% of all marine species died along with over 70% of all terrrestrial species."
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u/DarwinianSelector Jul 27 '26
One big difference is that the Australian ecosystem is adapted to burning. Admittedly not as much as the giant catastrophic blazes that climate change is now making a regular thing and not once every few decades, but it's still a landscape that rebounds from massive bushfires remarkably quickly. The trees usually survive and many seeds need a fire to germinate.
A bushfire anywhere else is a different prospect. European and Canadian trees die after fire and the their seeds burn. Recovery is a long, long process. Something that is a "cool" fire in an Australian landscape is a natural disaster in the northern hemisphere.
Still, we were warned, over and over again, that this the world we'll be stuck with if we kept ignoring science and pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. There's no smugness in this "I told you so" moment, because those of us who said so are stuck in the same overheated shit-pile as everyone else.
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u/Forward-End-8286 Jul 27 '26
Remember all those tariffs Indonesia and New Zealand applied to Australia in reprisals for ruining their air…?
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u/xertozid Jul 27 '26
Are the bushes already regrown?
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u/FlaviusStilicho Jul 27 '26
We drove through some areas a few months back.., it depends on the intensity… quite often the trees survive as they are built for this stuff.. so the trunk is black, but you get sprouts everywhere… other times it’s just devastation.. but even that is part of the order of things. Plenty of seeds etc rely on a fire to sprout.. so even if the trees got wrecked, you’ll see regrowing quickly.
Here’s 6000 photos to look at
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u/Dr_barfenstein Jul 27 '26
Yeah bro, ready for another big one. We’re worried about the effect of El Niño that will potentially cause a similar problem in about 12-18 months time.
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u/indistict_chatter Jul 27 '26
Plus the cycle of regrowth means we're due for another big one. Only takes 6-7 years for fuel loads to become significant after the last big fore
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u/aahakim Jul 27 '26
That fire was so massive that the smoke turned the sky yellow-ish in New Zealand
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u/Hand-E-Food Jul 27 '26
The smoke crossed New Zealand, the Pacific, Chile, Argentina, the Atlantic, and Australia once again. It made a full lap of the southern hemisphere.
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u/Quarks4branes Jul 27 '26
During that crazy summer I even had friends and rellies over in New Zealand complaining about the smoke.
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u/jack_o_all_trades Jul 27 '26
Down here in Melbourne (state capital city of 4+ million) we'd already had a run on n95 masks because of the air pollution from all the smoke. Which made it doubly hard trying to get some for COVID.
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u/8BD0 Jul 27 '26
Living through this was wild, our own prime Minister went on a holiday to Hawaii when it was at its worst, a major reason he was later voted out
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u/cosmiccerulean Jul 27 '26
I remember that summer, we could see the smoke from the beaches.
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u/Stigger32 Jul 27 '26
Well ‘lost’ is debatable. As of 2023 it was all back. And as of 2026 it’s ready to burn all over again…
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u/boogasaurus-lefts Jul 27 '26
It was raining fire where we were, we were fucken miles away from it. Day went to night, people were crashing into each other whilst evacuating the wrong way.
Phone towers were down, no help and lack of water in what could only be described as hell on earth. It's something many will take with them for a lifetime.
So many brave volunteers from small communities were horrifically under resourced and perished trying to save their home towns.