Bushfire Season Ends in Australia

By Helitak430 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85436323

March 31 marked the end of the bushfire season in Australia.

As of 9 March 2020, the fires burnt an estimated 18.6 million hectares of land.

Over 5,900 buildings, including 2,779 homes, were destroyed and 34 people were killed.

An estimated one billion animals have been killed and some endangered species may be driven to extinction.

At its peak, air quality dropped to hazardous levels.

The cost of dealing with the bushfires is expected to exceed the A$4.4 billion of the 2009 Black Saturday fires, and tourism sector revenues fell below more than A$1 billion.

By 7 January 2020, the smoke had moved approximately 11,000 kilometres across the South Pacific Ocean to Chile and Argentina.

As of 2 January 2020, NASA estimated that 306 million tonnes of CO2 had been emitted.