Australia's smoke, around the world

The smoke from Australia's bushfires has spread across the globe, Nasa's satellite images have shown. The fires that started in late September last year, peaked around the New Year and killed both humans and animals. It also threw up a lot of smoke into the skies above as this image from Melbourne shows. Photo: @ajplus / Twitter

In a series of images taken from the NASA Suomi NPP satellite, a plume of ash and smoke can be seen billowing over Australia. In this image, the black circle shows the ash plume that went into the stratosphere and came back over Australia after circumnavigating the globe. The red circle shows newly formed ash plumes. The green circle shows dust formed by storms over the continent. Photo: Nasa

The ash plume, according to US scientists, was formed by thunderstorm clouds over the fires known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds. The part of this image to the left of the black line shows smoke south of western Australia on January 13. The black circle on the right side of the image shows smoke on January 12. Photo: Nasa

This image shows the burnt out areas in Australia in dark brown or black, like Kangaroo island on the left of the image. Untouched areas are shown in green or bright green. The image also shows two types of clouds: One type are white in colour, form lower to the ground and consist mostly of water droplets. The other type are made up of ice crystals, are dense and higher up and shown in turquoise. Photo: Nasa

This image shows the formation of aerosols (in yellow) in those areas that are still burning (in red) in eastern Australia. Photo: Nasa