This article missed the chance to be much more interesting. While the 2019-2020 Australian fires were undoubtedly catastrophic, there have been other much worse

This article missed the chance to be much more interesting. While the 2019-2020 Australian fires were undoubtedly catastrophic, there have been other much worse fires in recent times. This one killed 34 people; a decade prior, the bushfire season killed 5 times as many people, with 174 deaths. Four decades prior to that, the bushfire season burned 5 times as much land area as the 2019-2020 season, with over 15% of Australia’s total land area suffering fire damage. It was the particularly intense burning, causing smoke to travel much further than usual, that caused this season to loom so large in people’s minds. There are astounding figures, like that 80% of the populace experienced days or weeks of heavily smoke-filled air, or that it arguably killed as many as 450 people indirectly through smoke inhalation interacting with existing respiratory issues. That intense burning was due mostly to the extremely high fuel density of the particular areas that were on fire - forests rather than grasslands. And the intense burning caused some incredible phenomena: flames at ground level that would reach the 20th floor of a skyscraper, radiant heat so extreme that you could be standing on the other side of an 8-lane highway and it would still give you 2nd degree degree burns in seconds and kill you in minutes, fire fronts that travel for days at an average of 6-8 miles an hour (even an ultra-marathon runner with a head start could not stay ahead of the fire) and reach peak speeds over 80mph (overtaking you in your car)… and all throughout, the roar of a thousand jet engines as vegetation literally exploded at the fire’s approach - gaseous decomposition from the ambient heat. These fires were so intense that they launched smoke far higher into the atmosphere than fires usually do, and so we got to see some very unusual chemistry happen in the atmosphere. I criticize the article for not being as interesting as it could be because it exhibits the same malady as so much of the other reporting on that bushfire season - the unique physics ignored in favour of using the tragedy for political purposes.