As wildfire consumes hundreds of thousands of forested acres
every summer, NASA’s Earth-observing satellites keep tabs on the
destruction. The Aqua and Terra satellites can help scientists
and land-use managers figure out how much land has burned and
where, as well as how fires are responding to the changing
climate. Now the visualization wizards at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center have stitched this data together into a timelapse
video, which you can watch past the jump.The video includes
fires detected in the continental United States from 2002
through July 2011. 2011 was a banner year for wildfire, with 2.7
million acres burning just in Texas, and featuring a fire that
threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
From 2009 to 2011 alone, more than 200,000 fires consumed 18
million acres across the nation. NASA says that is equivalent to
the combined area of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire,
Delaware and Rhode Island. And that doesn’t even include 2012,
in which wildfires gobbled hund