New Guinea, the world's second-largest island, is home to more than a dozen distinct ecoregions - seasonally dry savannas, tropical rainforests, lowland swamp forests - an extraordinary plant diversity that is currently being comprehensively smoked. In September and October 2026, as drought gripped the island (sometimes called Papua) amid a strong El Niño, fires scorched the land and smoke shrouded large swaths of it for weeks.
The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-20 satellite captured an image of thick smoke streaming from the southern part of the island on October 11, 2026. In recent weeks, soaring air pollution delayed and canceled flights, closed schools, and prompted officials in some areas to urge children and older people to wear masks - a public health advisory that has become an unfortunate staple of the modern fire season.
"Sometimes smoke that has drifted into the convection of nearby thunderstorms will get washed out or lofted up into the upper troposphere, but a lot of smoke stays near the surface and causes air quality problems," said Robert Field, an associate research scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University. "It's a horrible situation." Field's assessment, while not exactly breaking new ground in the optimism department, is accurate.
According to the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED), fires in Papua New Guinea, on the eastern half of the island, had released nearly 32 megatons of carbon by October 19 - more than any other year on record at that point in the year. "Emissions are already much higher than the 2015 total for the year, and it's very likely that this will become the highest year on record for Papua New Guinea, even surpassing 1997," said Guido van der Werf, a fire scientist at Wageningen University & Research. For context, 1997 and 2015 were also El Niño years with severe fires, which is the climatological equivalent of saying the bar was already on the floor and someone brought a limbo stick.
On the Indonesian side, sometimes called West New Guinea or Indonesian Papua, carbon emissions exceeded 35 megatons - the third highest after 2015 and 1997, other El Niño years with severe fires. Van der Werf led the development of GFED, a satellite-driven modeling framework that uses a mix of remote sensing, vegetation characteristics, and other information to estimate the extent of vegetation fires and emissions over nearly three decades.
Unusually dry weather - a byproduct of El Niño shifting rainfall patterns - has primed ecosystems across the island to burn. The southernmost part of Papua New Guinea, dominated by relatively fire-prone savannas and grasslands of the Trans-Fly region, went more than 90 consecutive days without rain, according to Papua New Guinea's National Weather Service. Since August, parts of the region have seen precipitation of roughly 5 to 10 percent of normal, according to the weather service's data. Local news outlets report that drought is causing crop failures, water shortages, and school disruptions - because nothing says "climate anomaly" like a school closure caused by a sky full of smoke.
In this normally wet part of the world, people ignite the vast majority of fires, researchers say. Crop fires, pasture maintenance, deforestation and land clearing, and hunting are all common reasons people burn in New Guinea. In dry conditions, managed fires sometimes spread and burn uncontrolled as wildfires, particularly in the drier, southernmost parts of the island - a reminder that "controlled burn" is a phrase that assumes a certain level of control.
"We're seeing an exceptionally high level of fire activity in Papua New Guinea and Eastern Indonesia, particularly Indonesian Papua and Kalimantan, this year compared with Sumatra and other parts of Western Indonesia," said Yang Chen, an associate researcher at the University of California, Irvine. "Papua has emerged as Indonesia's new deforestation frontier."
Over the past two decades, land in Indonesian Papua has been cleared for industrial oil palm and pulpwood plantations, shifting small-scale cultivation, urban expansion, and mining. According to Global Forest Watch, the region lost 27,000 hectares of primary forest in 2025 - nearly double the 2024 total and the most since 2017. That's 27,000 hectares of primary forest, which is the kind of forest that takes centuries to grow back and about a week to clear.
Sumatra's fires are relatively low compared to other drought years partly because many areas are already developed. "Areas with large oil palm, sugarcane, or pulpwood plantations also often have their own private fire brigades to protect their assets," said Field. "It's in unmanaged areas or primary forest edges where we're generally seeing the most fire." In other words, the places with the least protection burn the most - a dynamic that is as predictable as it is depressing.
Researchers expect the fires to continue until the heavy rains of the wet season arrive in the southern part of New Guinea, typically in early November. Until then, the island's extraordinary plant life - and its residents - will continue to breathe what NASA politely calls "air quality problems."
NASA Earth Observatory image and charts by Michala Garrison, using data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), and the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). Story by Adam Voiland.