The wildfires in Australia have burned a massive expanse of land.
Fueled by drought and extreme heat, the bushfires have burned across the country since September, killing 24 people and destroying more than 1,000 homes.
As of Jan. 7, approximately 32,400 square miles, an area of land a little smaller than Indiana, have burned since the blazes began. That’s 5,000 square miles (an area about the size of Connecticut), more than the area of land that burned during 2019’s devastating Amazon rainforest fires and 80 times larger than the total area burned in the 2019 California wildfires.
How large is 32,400 square miles (25.5 million acres)? Use the map below to compare that area to your home town.
Read the latest news on Australia's wildfires.
CORRECTION (Jan. 8, 2020, 6:05 p.m. ET): An earlier version of the interactive map displaying the aggregate size of the wildfires misrepresented their size. The radius of the circle representing the wildfires should be 101 miles, not 57 miles. In addition a map miscalculated the size of Australia's wildfires compared to a U.S. city, and a graphic incorrectly showed the size of the Amazon rainforest fires and the 2019 California fires. The map and the graphic have been fixed.
