France Had Never Seen a “Fire Cloud” Until This Month’s Record-Smashing Blazes

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Firefighters in France are confronting a phenomenon never seen in the region before: fire clouds. It’s a sign of the intensity of the blazes burning—and how climate change is upping the odds that they appear.

France's Gironde wildfire spawned a never-before-recorded pyrocumulonimbus cloud that struck the earth with lightning and lit fresh fires.