File:An Appalling Pall over the Amazon (MODIS 2022-08-28).jpg

English: A thick, gray blanket of smoke hung over the Amazon Rainforest in late August 2022, pumped into the atmosphere by hundreds of fires burning in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of fires and smoke on August 26.

Each red “hot spot” marks a location where the thermal bands on the MODIS instrument detected high temperatures. When combined with typical smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for actively burning fire. Fires in the Amazon tend to peak in August and September, which is near the end of the dry season. Fire is used to manage agricultural land, and also widely used to destroy forest in this region so that, once stripped of rainforest, the land can be used to make profits in agriculture or industry. Areas that were deforested in previous years are also at higher risk of severe wildfire, and the risk of severe wildfire is greatest at the end of the dry season.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest has already reached a record high at the end of June 2022, according to Brazilian government data. The national space research agency, INPE estimated that 3,988 square km (1,540 square miles) were cleared in the first six months of the year—an area roughly five times the size of New York City. That’s the highest level of deforestation since record-keeping began in mid-2015.

INPE was also quoted as reporting that on August 22, satellite monitoring detected 3,358 fires in Brazil. This is the highest number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon for any 24-hour period since September 2007. The article states, “The number was nearly triple that recorded on the so-called "Day of Fire"—August 10, 2019—when farmers launched a coordinated plan to burn huge amounts of felled rainforest in the northern state of Para.”

And, of course, the Amazon Rainforest stretches over eight countries, not just Brazil. Although deforestation is occurring at an increasing, alarming, and appalling rate in Brazil, as this image demonstrates, other countries are also destroying the Amazon Rainforest at a rapid rate. Here we can see that copious fires and deforestation are also occurring in Peru and Bolivia in August 2022.