Australia is burning, but is it this bad?
- A viral photo shows Australia smoldering like a piece of charcoal about to ignite.
- The composite image shows all fires over an entire month, which is not the same as all fires raging at the same time.
- That's not to say the devastation isn't real, and growing–as proven by another map.
Bushfires from space
Police and firefighters near the scene of a bushfire in Yanderra, New South Wales, in late December 2019.
Image: Helitak430, CC BY-SA 4.0
How bad are the fires in Australia? They're huge, deadly and apocalyptic. But not quite this bad. This three-dimensional visualization of the bushfires Down Under is going viral, in part because it was 'miscaptioned' – to the horror of its creator, Anthony Hearsey.
The image purports to be a view on the country's bushfires from space. It shows Australia lit up all over, like a smoldering piece of charcoal about to ignite entirely. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. And nothing illustrates more eloquently the devastating emergency of Australia's bushfires than this horrific map.
Composite image
3D composite image of bushfires in Australia from 5 December 2019 to 5 January 2020.
Image: anthonyhearsey.com
However, this is not "a photo of Australian fires taken from the Space Station', as some would have it. The truth is a bit more nuanced.
Yes, Mr Hearsey—a photography and post-production specialist—based his map of Australia on actual images from NASA satellites. But it's not a single image of fires raging at the same time; rather, it's a composite image, of all fires that have raged between 5 December 2019 and 5 January 2020. "This is NOT A PHOTO," Mr Hearsey says. "Think of it as a prettier-looking graph."
As a 'collection' of all the fires that raged within the limited time frame of a single month, the image remains a shocking enough indicator of the fiery emergency that Australia is facing at the moment. All the areas lit up have been affected by bushfires over the past month—but they are not all still burning.
Fact-checking website Snopes.com referenced the image under the heading fauxtography, providing the context that is lacking in the many other places that the picture is showing up: "Composite images created from multiple data inputs are often mistaken for literal photographs."
The size of Denmark
3 January: if the bushfires had centered on London and burned in a neat square, they would have engulfed Cambridge, Oxford and Southampton.
Image: The Guardian
Here are two other maps that help put the Australian bushfires in a proper context. They both show the combined area burned by bushfires in the Australian states of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. Both are centered on London.
The first one dates from 3 January, at which time the affected area comprised 4.3 million hectares. That's 43,000 km2 (16,600 sq. mi.), which corresponds to a square that includes Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton and extends to the coast of Kent. For the less London-centric, that's an area about the size of Denmark, or slightly larger than Maryland.
8.4 million hectares
6 January: The square has doubled in size, now also covering the north of France.
Image: The Guardian
The second one dates from 6 January, when the burned lands totaled 8.4 million hectares. That corresponds to 84,000 km2 (32,400 sq. mi.). In just a few days, the area devastated by fire has virtually doubled. The square has grown significantly, now encompassing England up to the Wash and well into the Midlands and covering a much larger part of the English Channel, up to and including a strip of northern France. That corresponds to about the size of Austria, or South Carolina.
The size of the affected area is monitored by this map at The Guardian. Sadly, there seems little doubt that the square will continue to grow, covering an ever greater area of the UK and France. The map is interactive: It allows you to zoom out and recenter the square over any part of the world you may be more familiar with, to—literally—bring home the size of Australia's trial by fire.
To donate much-needed funds to help fight the fires and support its victims, visit this list of places to donate, compiled by The New York Times.
Image of 'charcoal' Australia found here at anthonyhearsey.com. First, smaller 'burnt square' found here at the Mapporn subreddit. Second image found here at The Guardian.
Strange Maps #1005
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Considering how much sharks are feared by humans, it is a bit of a surprise that scientists don't know much about the predators. For example, until recently, sharks were thought to be solitary creatures searching the seas for food on their own. Now it appears that some sharks are quite social.
Another mystery is how these prehistoric swimming and eating machines digest food. Although scientists have made 2D sketches of captured sharks' digestive systems based on dissections, there is a limit to what can be learned in this way. Professor Adam Summers at University of Washington's Friday Harbor Labs says:
"Intestines are so complex, with so many overlapping layers, that dissection destroys the context and connectivity of the tissue. It would be like trying to understand what was reported in a newspaper by taking scissors to a rolled-up copy. The story just won't hang together."
Summers is co-author of a new study that has produced the first 3D scans of a shark's intestines, which turns out to have a strange, corkscrew structure. What's even more bizarre is that it resembles the amazing one-way valve designed by inventor Nikola Tesla in 1920. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
What a 3D model reveals
Video: Pacific spiny dogfish intestine youtu.be
According to the study's lead author Samantha Leigh, "It's high time that some modern technology was used to look at these really amazing spiral intestines of sharks. We developed a new method to digitally scan these tissues and now can look at the soft tissues in such great detail without having to slice into them."
"CT scanning is one of the only ways to understand the shape of shark intestines in three dimensions," adds Summers. The researchers scanned the intestines of nearly three dozen different shark species.
It is believed that sharks go for extended periods — days or even weeks — between big meals. The scans reveal that food passes slowly through the intestine, affording sharks' digestive system the time to fully extract its nutrient value. The researchers hypothesize that such a slow digestive process may also require less energy.
It could be that this slow digestion is more susceptible to back flow given that the momentum of digested food through the tract must be minimal. Perhaps that is why sharks evolved something so similar to a Tesla valve.
What is Tesla's valve doing there?
Above, a Tesla valve. Below, a shark intestine.Credit: Samantha Leigh / California State University, Domi
Tesla's "valvular conduit," or what the world now calls a "Tesla valve," is a one-way valve with no moving parts. Its brilliance is based in fluid dynamics and only now coming to be fully appreciated. Essentially, a series of teardrop-shaped loops arranged along the length of the valve allow water to flow easily in one direction but not in the other. Modern tests reveal that at low flow rates, water can travel through the valve either way, but at high flow rates, the design kicks in. According to mathematician Leif Ristroph:
"Crucially, this turn-on comes with the generation of turbulent flows in the reverse direction, which 'plug' the pipe with vortices and disrupting currents. Moreover, the turbulence appears at far lower flow rates than have ever previously been observed for pipes of more standard shapes — up to 20 times lower speed than conventional turbulence in a cylindrical pipe or tube. This shows the power it has to control flows, which could be used in many applications."
A deeper dive
Summers suggests the scans are just the beginning. "The vast majority of shark species, and the majority of their physiology, are completely unknown," says Summers, adding that "every single natural history observation, internal visualization, and anatomical investigation shows us things we could not have guessed at."
To this end, the researchers plan to use 3D printing to produce models through which they can observe the behavior of different substances passing through them — after all, sharks typically eat fish, invertebrates, mammals, and seagrass. They also plan to explore with engineers ways in which the shark intestine design could be used industrially, perhaps for the treatment of wastewater or for filtering microplastics.
It could fairly be said, though, that Nikola Tesla was 100 years ahead of them.
Dumpster-diving trash parrots
In a study about these smart birds just published in Science, researchers define animal culture as "population-specific behaviors acquired via social learning from knowledgeable individuals."
Co-lead author of the study Barbara Klump of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany says, "[C]ompared to humans, there are few known examples of animals learning from each other. Demonstrating that food scavenging behavior is not due to genetics is a challenge."
An opportunity presented itself in a video that co-author Richard Major of the Australian Museum shared with Klump and the other co-authors. In the video, a sulphur-crested cockatoo used its beak to pull up the handle of a closed garbage bin — using its foot as a wedge — and then walked back the lid sufficiently to flip it open, exposing the bin's edible contents.
Major has been studying Cacatua galerita for 20 years and says, "Like many Australian birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos are loud and aggressive." The study describes them as a "large-brained, long-lived, and highly social parrot." Says Major, "They are also incredibly smart, persistent, and have adapted brilliantly to living with humans."
(Research regarding some of the ways in which wild animals adapt to the presence of humans has already produced some fascinating results and is ongoing.)Clever cockie opens bin - 01 youtu.be
The researchers became curious about how widespread this behavior might be and saw a research opportunity. After all, says John Martin, a researcher at Taronga Conservation Society, "Australian garbage bins have a uniform design across the country, and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common across the entire east coast."
Martin continues, "In 2018, we launched an online survey in various areas across Sydney and Australia with questions such as, 'What area are you from, have you seen this behavior before, and if so, when?'"
Word Gets Around
Credit: magspace/Adobe Stock
Although the cockatoos' maneuver was reported in only three suburbs before 2018, by the end of 2019, people in 44 areas reported observing the behavior. Clearly, more and more cockatoos were learning how to successfully dumpster dive.
As further proof, says Klump, "We observed that the birds do not open the garbage bins in the same way, but rather used different opening techniques in different suburbs, suggesting that the behavior is learned by observing others." One individual bird in north Sydney invented its own method, and the scientists saw it grow in popularity throughout the local population.
To track individual birds, the researchers marked 500 cockatoos with small red dots. Subsequent observations revealed that not all cockatoos are bin-openers. Only about 10 percent of them are, and they are mostly males. The other cockatoos apparently restrict their education to a different lesson: hang around with a bin-opener, and you will get supper.
Thanks to the surveys, the researchers consider the entire project to be a valuable citizen-science experiment. "By studying this behavior with the help of local residents, we are uncovering the unique and complex cultures of their neighborhood birds."
