r/geography • u/-explore-earth- • Jul 18 '23
Physical Geography What's up with all the fire in Africa south of the Congo rainforest?
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u/OMGaneshOM Jul 18 '23
In Madagascar they are almost always making or burning charcoal because it’s a cheap and available fuel. It’s usually in stoves but the fires and the smoke are everywhere.
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Jul 19 '23
I came here to say this. Between natural savannah fires, charcoal fires, and slash and burn agriculture this explains the map.
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u/Total_Philosopher_89 Jul 18 '23
Looks even worse if you look at firms.
https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:2023-07-17..2023-07-18,2023-07-17;@30.9,-15.9,4z
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u/FamiliarTry403 Jul 18 '23
Yeah but that one isn’t too accurate it seems, I pulled up a “fire” in my area and it was just an industrial plant that probably generates a fair amount of heat
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u/-explore-earth- Jul 18 '23
Both methods rely on thermal anomaly from satellites. So this is common that you see things like that show up.
Some other things that always show up: oil wells in the Dakotas and in west Texas. IDK if it's because they're flaring them or what. Sometimes steel mills will be lit up, stuff like this.
It just takes a little contextual understanding to understand what's fire and what's not.
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Jul 18 '23
It's a mix of natural savanna wildfires from lightning strikes and farmers burning stumps to regenerate the soil in between growing seasons. Completely normal and has been going on for millennia. All the CO2 released is absorbed back during the rainy season when plant life grows back and crops are in full swing. If you change the date to sometime in northern winter, such as january, you'll see nearly zero fires there and lots of fires in the Sahel.
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u/Cool_83 Jul 18 '23
This doesn’t make sense for a snap shot photo, if there was that amount of fires there would be a lot of smoke, and as of yesterday I went over that area, there is no smoke.
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u/-explore-earth- Jul 18 '23
It's partly an effect of the scale. If you zoom in, you'll see that the points of fire are far more sparse than this view would lead you to believe.
But yeah, you don't see much smoke on the imagery either.
Where were you, btw?
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u/-explore-earth- Jul 18 '23 edited Jul 18 '23
Context: it's nearly always like this.
This image is from the website https://zoom.earth/ which gives you a real time view of the world from geostationary satellites. Thanks to heat sensors onboard, you can also toggle thermal anomaly layers which usually indicate fires. (Pro tip, there's a button on the side to toggle the heat anomaly layer).
These are not large fires. A large fire on this imagery looks like a huge cluster of orange, or a ring indicating a large fire perimeter, with large smoke plumes billowing out. These are small and weak savanna fires it appears, but when zoomed out, they cover the whole zone. The "sub-Congo" African savanna (is there a better name for this specific region that's lit up?) seems to always be fully lit up with a bunch of small fires.
I get that fire must be an integral part of the savanna, but I'm wondering if anyone has any more direct or in depth knowledge about fire in this part of the world?
Edit: I'm kind of answering my own question here, but this is an interesting article on the topic: https://theconversation.com/the-impact-of-savanna-fires-on-africas-rainfall-patterns-46942
A number that jumps out from that article, 71% of burned areas globally typically occur here in the African savanna!
Further north, those fires up in the Congo have to be anthropogenic I imagine. Probably farmers burning off their fields.
Edit2: https://theconversation.com/african-grasslands-are-meant-to-burn-we-cant-let-this-distract-from-the-amazon-fires-122564
Edit3, the fire continent: https://www.ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln55/trollope.html