Alaska's Funny River fire cuts across the landscape like a neon wound in a new satellite image of the state's Kenai Peninsula.
The fire began on May 19, likely as a result of an improperly extinguished campfire, state officials have said. As of yesterday (May 22), the fire had spread over 44,423 acres (180 square kilometers) and was 5 percent contained, according to the state's interagency incident management team.
Satellite imagery, however, makes the extent of the burn clear. The Landsat 8 satellite captured the Funny River fire in natural color on May 21, as well as in infrared light. The latter view reveals the layers of the fire in false color: Orange for flames, reddish-brown for burnt Earth, and light blue for smoke. Tustumena Lake is at the bottom of the image in royal blue, and Cook Inlet is to the left.
The mushroom-like structures within the smoke are pyrocumulonimbus clouds, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. These clouds are the fire's own weather: They form from superheated air rising over the fire. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds sometimes produce light precipitation, and sometimes are associated with lightning or hail.
According to a 2010 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, pyrocumulonimbus clouds are capable of pushing particles from smoke into the stratosphere, a phenomenon once blamed on volcanic eruptions.
In the natural-color image, the pyrocumulonimbus clouds rise above a carpet of smoke. Hot, dry weather has stoked forest fires in Alaska as well as Siberia this spring.
Editor's Note: If you have an amazing Earth or general science photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Jeanna Bryner at LSphotos@livescience.com.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.
