The vast clouds of smoke from Australia's historic bush fires are expected to circle the Earth and return to the country, Nasa says. The US agency said satellites have been monitoring the movement of the smoke high in the atmosphere as it swirled east towards South America and beyond.
After weeks of criticism over the handling of the bushfires scorching Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday he will propose a national review into the response to the disaster, as the fires claimed another firefighter's life.
Australian authorities warned people on Wednesday to prepare for another wave of evacuations as temperatures in the country's southeast began to rise after a days-long cool spell, bringing the danger of revitalized blazes.
Smoke from bushfires raging across Australia reached Brazil on Tuesday, an arm of the National Institute for Space Research said on Twitter. Referring to satellite images, the agency's Department of Remote Sensing said the smoke had arrived in Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul.
The cloud of smoke caused by raging bushfires in Australia has been spotted more than 12,000km away in Chile and Argentina, weather authorities in the South American countries said on Monday. Meteorologists in Uruguay expect the cloud in the next 24 hours.
Bushfires across Australia's east coast are set to pile on more pain for the country's dairy industry, already hurt by a prolonged drought, as processors in one of the world's largest exporters face tightening milk supplies.
Reserve troops were deployed to fire-ravaged regions across three Australian states on Monday after a torrid weekend that turned swathes of land into smoldering, blackened hellscapes.
The Australian navy on Friday began evacuating around 1,000 people stranded on the east coast of the fire-ravaged country as a searing weather front was set to whip up more blazes across the states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW).
Thousands of tourists have been given less than 48 hours to evacuate fire-ravaged coastal communities as Australia braces for a heatwave on Saturday expected to fan deadly bushfires.
Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were trapped on a beach in fire-ravaged southeast Australia on Tuesday, as blazes ringed a popular tourist area leaving no escape by land. As many as four thousand people are trapped on the foreshore of the encircled seaside town of Mallacoota, as smoke turned day to night and the authorities said nearby fires were causing extreme thunderstorms and ember attacks.