Burn

Greetings, friends,
No screed this time, just visuals. Click on this (thanks, Geri):
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=11806

This is a satellite image of the fires in California taken yesterday. It's absolutely mind-boggling. The colors are enhanced and the fires are circled, but other than that you see the power of nature: bow down, human. This is an amazing picture. You can see Southern California and northern Baja is wonderful detail; if you know where to look (in the high-res photo only), where the a-bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s: Find Lake Mead in the upper right corner, than pan over to the brown spot (Mount Charleston; Vegas is in between them.) The brown patches to the NW, along the border, are the mountains around the Amargosa Desert. The Test Site is the small gray patches on the edge of the picture north of those mountains. Death Valley is the white patches to the south. You can also see a lot of other interesting things if you have a minute, click on the picture and a larger, detailed version unfolds slowly. You can see the two small lightning-strike fires in the Sequoias, and a small fire near Morro Bay. There are large fires in the Sespes NW of Ventura, then the Santa Susanas to just across Simi Valley, and two small fires in what looks like Somis; to the east there are fires along the entire front of the San Bernardino range, from the slopes of Mt. Baldy to Mt. San Gorgonio. South of that are the largest fires: several small blazes in Camp Pendleton and further west just below the Domenci Reservoir, and then an enormous string of fires throughout the entire Cleveland National Forest and the Cuyamaca Mountains, completely obscuring San Diego in smoke. Finally, below the border, there are two large fires in Baja, the northern one very close to Ensenada.

Most Californians are nervous about earthquakes, but fires are the real danger to us in this state.