True devastation of Amazon blaze

Wildfires that swept the central Amazon in 2015 caused a loss of around 27 per cent of vegetation there over the next three years. The fires were caused by severe drought after the potent 2015 El Nino, a climate pattern that sees the central and eastern Pacific Ocean surface warm, leading to extreme weather across the world. Wildfires during this period burned an estimated 9246 square kilometres of the Amazon in total, even affecting the central region, which is historically wet and fire-resistant. Aline Pontes-Lopes at the National Institute for Space Research in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her team have measured how plants in the central Amazon fared in the three years after the fires.