Australia s Black Summer bushfires acted like a volcanic eruption, slightly cooling the globe
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Australia s Black Summer bushfires acted like a volcanic eruption, slightly cooling the globe
By Maddie Stone
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Australia s disastrous 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfire season blew so much smoke into the upper atmosphere that it blocked sunlight from reaching Earth s surface, potentially causing a brief global cooling effect comparable to a moderate volcanic eruption, new research has found.
In late 2019 and early 2020, raging bushfires in south-east Australia spawned a rash of rare fire-induced thunderclouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs. This pyroCb super outbreak , as scientists are now calling it, injected plumes of smoke into the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that starts about nine miles overhead. There, the smoke plumes spun up their own