3 ms·
> roughly the size of the state of Oregon That's huge! Right? How big are the biggest fires? Is there someone keeping track of all these extreme events, like w
by kinjba11 5y ago
> roughly the size of the state of Oregon
That's huge! Right? How big are the biggest fires? Is there someone keeping track of all these extreme events, like we track hurricanes and storms?
Oregon is 98,466 mi². In comparison, the wildfires in Oregon last year that covered half the state in smoke for weeks were about 2,000 mi².
- dredmorbius 5y agoNote that there's the actual burnt region, and the region affected by the fire. I'm referring to the latter, where for a region ~500 km / 300 mi on a side, there's an overwhelming amount of fire. There's remarkably little news coverage of this, though the Siberian Times has run a few over the past several weeks. Again, the past few days' development has been immense.
- akiselev 5y agoYup that's massive. According to [1] the biggest fires in the US were the 2014 Northwest Territories fires which burned 8 million acres or ~12,500 square miles. 98,466 sq mi is more area than all of the wildfires in the United States going back to 2007 COMBINED. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires
- SpaceNugget 5y agoThat's not in the US. The Northwest Territories are in Canada. The largest fire in the US on that list is the 2020 California wildfire at ~6,900 square miles.