Map of the Week
Three months of fire on Earth, seen from space
NASA satellites detected 5.6 million vegetation fires between late July and mid-October. 50% of them burned in Africa, most of them set on purpose.
Drag to turn the globe, zoom with + and −, or pick a month.Open full screen
Map: SpatialStat, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0NASA FIRMS, VIIRS NOAA-20GHSL Degree of Urbanisation, European Commission (CC BY 4.0)NASA Blue Marble imagery (public domain)Natural Earth (public domain)
Every point of light on this globe is a place where a NASA satellite saw a fire burning between July, 21 and October,18 2026. There are 5671874 of them, and almost none are the wildfires that make the news.
Where the planet burns
2840304% of all detections were in Africa and 606861% in South America. Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola together account for 35.7% (approximately 36%) of the total over the entire period. North of the equator the season was winding down; south of it, it was at its peak.
Most of these fires are lit by people: farmers clearing fields after harvest, herders renewing grass for cattle, land being cleared for crops. Africa alone accounts for about 70% of the world’s burned area each year, according to a 2021 study in PNAS.
Month by month
Use the month buttons on the globe. [What moves: e.g. the fire belt across southern Africa in August, the peak in Brazil in September, the start of crop-residue burning in northern India in October.]
What we removed, and why
A satellite sees heat, not fire. To keep this map about burning vegetation, we removed:
- 168909 detections inside towns and cities, using the European Commission’s Degree of Urbanisation map;
- 178611 at persistent heat sources such as gas flares, steel works and volcanoes, which glow at the same spot week after week;
- 27654 offshore, mostly oil and gas platforms.
Villages and farmland stay on the map, because that is where most of the fires are.
How to read it
Each detection is a 375-metre pixel that was hot when the NOAA-20 satellite passed overhead, about twice a day. One large fire can light up many pixels, and fires under thick cloud or smoke are missed. The colour shows how many detections fell in each cell of roughly 10 by 10 kilometres over the whole period.
The data, code and method are open: see how this map was made and our methods page.
