From the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, to the Pantanal Wetlands, to the Gran Chanco plains of Paraguay and Argentina, hundreds of fires were burning across South America on August 15, 2005. This image of the heart of the continent was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, and it shows fires marked in red and a cloud of smoke hanging over a large swath of the heart of the continent. The smoke appears to flow southward in a great river. Only the skies over the high deserts of Chile appear clear. The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 500 meters per pixel.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.
