In May, a wildfire driven by unusually hot, dry weather burned through the town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, scorching nearly 1.5 million acres and displacing tens of thousands of people.
In California, two major wildfires ? the Soberanes fire along the Central Coast and the Sand fire around the Santa Clarita Valley near Los Angeles ? continue to rage. As of Friday, they had burned a collective 70,000 acres.
While these large fires have garnered widespread media attention, they only begin to tell the story of what’s happening in the U.S. and around the world.
“Already in the U.S. this year, more than 29,000 fires have burned 2.6 million acres,” NASA scientist Doug Morton said in an online interview. “The Amazon is the driest it’s been in 14 years, and smoke from wildfires in the Amazon can drift to southern Brazil, changing air quality and potentially impacting the [Rio de Janeiro] Olympics.”
Below, a look at some of NASA’s incredible and gut-wrenching satellite imagery of this year’s fires, from California and China, to Canada to Russia.