Today’s largest fires behave in surprising ways. In the late nineteen-nineties, a few scientists began inspecting satellite images of unusual clouds over Australia and elsewhere; the meteorologist Michael Fromm speculated that they could be connected to the convective force of giant wildfires below them. Eventually, the researchers confirmed that particularly powerful wildfires could cause not just pyrocumulus clouds but vast firestorms called pyrocumulonimbus columns. Created by the flames at ground level, the columns are tall enough to generate lightning, and their air currents are so strong that they can punch particles of smoke into the stratosphere, where commercial jets typically cruise. “There were some who literally laughed when we tried to tell them what we thought was going on,” Fromm told me. Skeptics believed that “if you saw aerosols in the stratosphere it had to be a volcano.” Read the rest here.