Views of the News

Since mid-December 2016, roughly two dozen wildfires in the Pampas region of Argentina have consumed almost 2.5 million acres while unleashing giant plumes of dense smoke. Likely caused by thunderstorms that followed a stretch of severe drought, the first fires started southwest of the city of Bahía Blanca. A Landsat 8 scene on December 22, 2016, shows smaller red burn scars from those initial blazes—an area of approximately 100,000 acres. Despite rain in the final days of December, a handful of hot spots persisted, and the fires spread. When it passed overhead on January 7, 2017, Landsat 8 captured dramatic imagery of large red burn scars across the landscape.