I hear you people are missing Alaska. Well, unfortunately it has burned down. We have been suffering from a huge fire, called the Funny River Fire, for over a week now. The fire has burned close to 200,000 acres of forest and wildlife preserve so far, more land than all the fires in the western U.S. for the year. We had a record breaking warm May with no rain at all until the last couple of days. That has helped slow down the fire but it's still less than half controlled, or "contained" as they firemen say. The picture below shows the outline of the fire compare to the size of NY City.
Here's a satellite image of it when it was smaller.
Here is what it looked like from the other night when i was walking the dogs down by the ocean:
That is all smoke with a pyrocumulus cloud bursting out of the top. That smoke came over to anchorage and blotted out the sun. It dropped ash all over our cars, and made it hard to sleep.
The fire, like almost all huge fires, was started by people who didn't listen to the scientists who called for a fire ban. It's in a wildlife refuge, so countless animals have died. But the firefighters did rescue some wolf puppies who had been abandoned by their mother.
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