A world map of large wildfires since 2002 — drag the year, or press play
This is a world map of large wildfire events. Each circle is one fire. Size is burned area; color is how long it burned.
Drag the year seek bar, or press play, to move through seasons since 2002. This is a history record — not a live map of fires burning now.
Drag the year slider to any month since 2002, or press play and watch fire seasons pulse across the continents. Fires cluster in dry seasons, so the map breathes — flaring up in one hemisphere while the other goes quiet.
Each circle is one fire event. The bigger the circle, the larger the burned area — on a logarithmic scale, since the largest fires burn thousands of times more land than typical ones. Color shifts from yellow for fires that ended within days to deep red for those that burned for months.
Boreal forests in Siberia and Canada, savannas in Africa and northern Australia, chaparral in California, cerrado in Brazil — fire belongs to very different landscapes, and this map shows them all at once. Drag sideways and the map wraps around the globe.
Point at any circle and the popup shows the country, the burned area in hectares, the start and end dates, and how many days the fire lasted. A quiet number like "94 days" tells you more about a fire season than any headline.
Play a few years and the world's fire belts draw themselves — the African savanna cycle, the boreal summers, the Australian dry season. Students see fire as a recurring planetary rhythm, not just a news event.
The 2019-20 Australian Black Summer, the 2018 California fires, Siberia in 2021 — jump to the season and see the events at their true scale, alongside everything else burning worldwide that month.
When a wildfire makes headlines, check the region's history: how often large fires occur there, how big they usually get, and whether this one is an outlier or part of the pattern.
Writers and educators can capture scenes like the 2019-20 Australian season or the vast African burning belt — framed exactly how they want, with the timeline set to the right month.
If you live near wildland, knowing how often large fires have actually occurred in your wider region — and in which months — is a solid first step when reviewing your own preparations.