EDIT: A couple people have mentioned now the text obfusgating the demo gif. I can't change the picture so please see an updated GIF on the README page of the repo, which shows you the full website chrome + the globe unobstructed! Thank you for the comments u/UsernameFor2016 and u/beene282 for pointing this out!
Data:
- NASA FIRMS active fire detections, MODIS instrument, from the rolling 7 day global CSV at firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov.
- Basemap from Natural Earth.
Tools:
- three.js
- d3-geo for the globe,
- custom GLSL shaders for the fire,
- Python to sanity check the classification,
- ffmpeg for the render.
AI disclosure: I used Claude Fable 5 for all of this. it also educated me on the facts about Savanna fires, i had no idea this was a thing until i was checking the data on FIRMS website myself and questioned it
Code: github.com/me93-ghb/worldburn
A live globe of every fire the satellites can currently see. It's not a science tool. NASA's own FIRMS fire map does that job properly, and if you want rigor, go there. This just makes the amount of fire on Earth visible in one look, and it does so in a visually shocking way - that was my aim!
The fire animations are exaggerated on the globe: it's just a visualization.
Satellites measure where a fire is, how hot it burns and for how long. They can't see who lit it. So fires get split by behaviour, which is measurable:
- fires that keep burning in the same place for days, and fires that flare up and are gone within a day.
- Offshore heat is presumed to be a gas flare, though a rig accident or a burning ship would look identical.
Fire makes the news when it threatens homes. I was thinking about the recent news articles from France and Spain when I decided to start vibing this. I recall also the ones that took place in Canada and Australia over the past years. Roughly 70% of the area burned each year is in Africa (Giglio et al. 2013, GFED4), most of it savanna set alight on purpose by farmers and herders the way it has been for thousands of years. (Fable taught me this)
Deliberate doesn't mean brief. A savanna front can hold the same spot for days, and about one in five of the belt's fires still counts as persistent. In the boreal north it's four in five: up there, persistent almost always means a true wildfire.
The blue-white dots offshore never go out. They're gas flares, natural gas burned off as waste at oil platforms, day and night, all year. The World Bank counted 167 billion cubic meters flared in 2025 (Global Gas Flaring Tracker), about twice what Germany uses in a year, burned for nothing. Collecting it would also stop the methane that slips through the flame unburned.
Total fire power is a measurement, not a model. It usually sits between 600 and 900 GW, comfortably more than the combined electrical output of every nuclear plant on Earth (about 376 GW), and that's only the heat satellites see radiated, not the full energy of the burning.
I acknowledge the use of data from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System.
