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A river of smoke more than 100 kilometers wide streams several hundredkilometers southward from fires (marked in red) in northern China (topleft) in this image from the Moderate Resolution ImagingSpectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite onOctober 15, 2004. Another large cluster of fires is burning insoutheastern Russia (right).
According to news reports on October 18, at least some of the firesin China were burning in and near forestry farms in northeast China'sHeilongjiang Province, and thousands of people and their property werethreatened by the blazes. The cause of the fires was still unknown.Across the Amur River (called Heilong Jiang in Chinese), a state ofemergency had been declared in southeastern Russia as fires raged in theregion’s taiga forests, steppes, and peat bogs. Strong winds werefanning the rapidly spreading fires, and weather was not expected toimprove in the short term.
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Image courtesy Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC
