A large fire in western British Columbia was spilling smoke down over the glacier-covered slopes of the Coast Range Mountains on July 28, 2004. In the deeply carved valleys between the white-capped peaks, turquoise rivers thick with finely ground glacial sediment flow out to the Pacific Ocean through the narrow gap between Vancouver Island (bottom left) and mainland Canada. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image, and the places where the sensor detected actively burning fires are outlined in red.
The high-resolution image provided above is 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at
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Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-GSFC
