Canada’s Wildfire Season Off to a Dangerous Start

As of Tuesday, a NASA satellite had detected four times as many fire hot spots across Canada as is typical for early June, the Times Colonist reported. According to Global Forest Watch, it’s the highest count recorded since the satellite began tracking fires in 2012—except for 2023. These near real-time detections are particularly valuable for monitoring fires in remote areas where ground-based sensors are sparse.

Still, the number of hot spots doesn’t directly reflect the number of fires. A single fire can be detected repeatedly over several days, and each detection covers an area about the size of 26 football fields—often just a portion of a much larger blaze, said James MacCarthy, wildfire research manager at Global Forest Watch.

So far this year, roughly 200 wildfires are actively burning across Canada, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, consuming an estimated 7,700 square miles (19,900 square kilometers)—most of it in just the past week.

Only 2023 saw similarly high numbers this early in the season, which runs from April through October. That year, wildfires burned a record 67,000 square miles—more than twice the surface area of Lake Superior.

Taken together, the number of satellite detections and area burned make 2025 the second-worst start to Canada’s wildfire season in recent history.