Haunting photo shows navy ship evacuating Australians trapped by fires
The Australian Navy's HMAS Choules can carry 32 tanks and up to 700 troops. It can also carry Australians fleeing from historic bushfires.
On Thursday night the Royal Australian Navy released photos documenting the evacuation of Australian citizens from the small coastal town of Mallacoota, in southeastern Australia. Mallacoota was surrounded by flames.
One particularly striking image shows the imposing HMAS Choules shrouded in a thick, smoky haze. The Navy got the request to evacuate Mallacoota's residents and tourists just before the new year, and brought two big vessels.
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“When the call came out in the late afternoon of New Year’s Eve, the ships’ companies gladly stepped up to the challenge, and both ships were underway less than 17 hours later," Choules Commander Scott Houlihan said in a statement released by the Navy.
Darren Chester, a member of Australia's House of Representatives, called the mission an "unprecedented mass relocation of civilians from Mallacoota" on Twitter.
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It's unprecedented because Australia is experiencing unprecedented bushfire conditions. David Bowman, who researches fire ecology at the University of Tasmania, told Mashable in December that an extreme confluence of record-breaking heat, drought, and wind created an unparalleled setup for the burning of Australia's wild and rural forests, brush, and grasslands.
"It's the dryness," said Bowman. "The fuels [vegetation] are incredibly dry and burning really efficiently."
"There's no end in sight," Bowman added. "There’s plenty of action left in this fire season. This is historic."
He was right. And the continued burning resulted in an extreme instance of people trapped in Mallacoota with no means of escape — other than by ship.
While the heating climate itself doesn't cause fires, it exacerbates them — just as climate change unquestionably amplifies the rapid melting of Greenland's vast ice sheet and loads the atmosphere with more water vapor, creating extreme flooding events.
2019 was Australia's warmest year on record. This added heat further parches vegetation that is already dried-out from drought. Add some winds, and all you need is a spark. The same thing happens in California.
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Like most of the planet, Australia has warmed significantly over the last century. So more extreme, if not unprecedented, bushfires are expected. In 2018, Australia's Department of Home Affairs published a report on current and future disaster risk, noting that with a "driver of a changing climate there is growing potential for some natural hazards to occur at unimagined scales, in unprecedented combinations and in unexpected locations."
In Earth's disrupted and still-changing climate — with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rising at historically and geologically unprecedented rates — dystopian scenes like those in Mallacoota might become more common.
After all, civilization's heat-trapping carbon emissions are still rising.
Mark was the science editor at Mashable. After working as a ranger with the National Park Service, he started a reporting career after seeing the extraordinary value in educating people about the happenings on Earth, and beyond.
He's descended 2,500 feet into the ocean depths in search of the sixgill shark, ventured into the halls of top R&D laboratories, and interviewed some of the most fascinating scientists in the world.
