Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

A lot of things are said to be “visible from space,” but not from six thousand miles above Earth. At that distance, one is on the far side of the exosphere, the invisible threshold beyond which only remote satellites and heavenly bodies are found. From this celestial height, Earth appears to be uninhabited—no Pyramids, no Great Wall, no Shanghai or Los Angeles; not even the Mississippi River is visible. Canada’s great boreal forest shows up as a green smear across the forehead of the globe, and only continental features like the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains are easily found. But if you know what you’re looking for, you can pick out Fort McMurray’s bitumen mining and upgrading complex. From 6,000 miles up, its visibility is comparable to that of San Francisco Bay or Cape Cod, both of which cover roughly one thousand square miles of land and water. Meanwhile, the world’s largest open pit mines—abyssal holes like Utah’s Bingham Canyon, or the Fimiston Super Pit in Western Australia—are nowhere to be seen.