The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. Or much of it, at least. On February 28, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research announced that 2,940 fires had burned in the Brazilian Amazon over the course of that month—a record-breaking number for a February. Many of them are still blazing. Real-time satellite monitoring shows that so far in 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have ripped across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, across multiple countries. Never have this many fires burned so much of the forest this early in the year. Scientists worry this is pushing the region closer and closer to a tipping point, where widespread degradation and repeated burning of the forest will become unstoppable. …“Fire is a contagious process,” says Bernando Flores, a researcher at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina, who studies changes in the Amazon. “If nothing is done, the system may eventually collapse from megafires.”