Chilling NASA image shows how much of earth is on fire right now

Science Alert: NASA’s Worldview program has some bad news. The Earth is on fire.
The red points in the picture above are areas around the world with fires actively burning, accurate as of Thursday. It doesn’t look great.
The Worldview website lets you look at current events happening across the planet. One of those events is wildfires, detected through the use of thermal bands to mark any actively burning fires.
Now, as NASA notes in a statement, these aren’t necessarily all wildfires – but it’s still an impactful image.We’ve all seen news about the fires in North America, but South America also has had a horrific number of fires this year.
And, as you can see on the map, Africa is actually the big one, with fires burning across large swaths of the southern parts of the continent.
“This could be due to the fact that these are most likely agricultural fires. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land,” a NASA spokesperson explains.
“Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality.”
Australia, and other areas in the Pacific are also suffering from wildfires and bushfires despite being in winter right now.
In fact, Australia is currently in the middle of an unusually severe drought through most of the country.