English: For much of May 2023, wildland fires raged in western Canada. In the last few days of the month, blazes flared up thousands of miles to the east as well, in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. The fires, unusually large for Nova Scotia, forced the evacuation of thousands of people.

Smoke billowed from a fire near the town of Shelburne on May 29, when an astronaut on the International Space Station took this photograph. By the morning of May 31, after four days of burning, the fire had scorched 17,000 hectares (66 square miles) near the southern tip of Nova Scotia. It became the largest forest fire in the province’s history, according to CBC Nova Scotia, exceeding the area burned (13,000 hectares) by a fire in Guysborough County over six days in June 1976.

On May 29, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a wider view of the blaze in Shelburne County (below). The fire grew rapidly from 6,000 hectares on that day to 17,000 hectares two days later, due to dry and windy conditions. More than a thousand people were evacuated from the area.