Smoke, blown in from hundreds of miles away, cloaked Sao Paulo in darkness Monday. Photo / Leandro Mota
In the height of daytime on Monday, the sky suddenly blackened, and day became night in Sao Paulo.
Sure, smog is bad in the Western Hemisphere's largest city, where traffic jams can stretch for dozens of kilometres. But not this bad. What was going on? Was the end near?
"Apocalypse!" one person cried on Twitter.
"The final judgment is coming!" another added.
"Mordor," one more person intoned.
Experts tried to puzzle it out, but their conclusions at times appeared to be conflicting, deepening the mystery. The National Institute of Meteorology said the city, which sits at an elevation of 2500 feet, was "inside a cloud." Others explained that it was a cold front. Metsul, a Brazilian meteorology company, said the culprit was smoke that had come in from forest fires in Bolivia, Paraguay and remote parts of Brazil.
In fact, it appeared to be a combination of all three factors - clouds, smoke and a cold front - that ushered in the smoke from distance reaches, plunging the city into darkness in the middle of the day.
"The smoke didn't come from fires in the state of Sao Paulo, but from very dense and wide fires that have been happening for several days in [the state of] Rondonia and Bolivia," Josélia Pegorim, a meteorologist with Climatempo, said in an interview with Globo. "The cold front changed direction and its winds transported the smoke to Sao Paulo."
The news highlighted the number of forest fires in Brazil, which rose by more than 80 per cent this year, according to data released this week by the National Institute of Space Science.
"This central Brazil and south of the Amazon Rainforest region has been undergoing a prolonged drought," Alberto Setzer, a researcher at Inpe, said in an interview with local media outlets. "And there are some places where there has not fallen a drop of rain for three months."
Most of the Amazon was once considered fireproof, but as climate change and deforestation remakes the world, wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, recent research has shown.
"Wildfires in the Amazon are not natural events, but are instead caused by a combination of droughts and human activities. Both anthropogenic climate change and regional deforestation are linked to increases in the intensity and frequency of droughts over Amazonia," British researchers wrote this year in the Conversation.
The darkened skies come as tensions rise between Brazil and its European donors over the preservation of the Amazon rainforest - and the spat is threatening to undermine a long-sought free-trade deal between Europe and South America.
The deal between the European Union and the South American trading bloc Mercosur requires Brazil to abide by the Paris climate accord. The climate pact aims to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.
But Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who favours development in the Amazon to lift Brazil up from four years of economic stagnation, has threatened to pull out of the Paris agreement. He refused to meet with France's foreign minister last month to discuss the deal, opting instead to get a haircut. Which he live-streamed.
Now deforestation is surging, and Europeans are calling for action.
"Europe must not stand idly by, as a prejudiced and hate-driven skeptic of science sacrifices vast jungle areas for cattle farmers and soybean crops," Germany's Der Spiegel wrote on Monday. The newspaper is one of at least two in Germany to call for sanctions.
Brazil's environmental ministry said last week that it would shut down the steering committee that selects projects to fight deforestation and redirect the money to compensate farmers whose land had been expropriated. Germany froze $39 million in aid; Norway cut $33 million.
Brazil has seen a steady increase in the destruction of the Amazon since 2013, as illegal deforestation has turned lush areas of forest into soy and cattle farms.
Bolsonaro, who was elected last year with the support of Brazil's powerful agricultural lobby, has said he is reclaiming the Amazon "for Brazilians." He has promised to relax the environmental permitting process for building dams and has railed against fines issued by the country's environmental regulation agency.
Yet scientists worry the deforestation could be reaching a point of no return. If an additional 3 to 8 per cent of the Amazon is destroyed, they estimate, the process will begin to feed on itself, and the forest will cease to grow back.
Bolsonaro was already under fire after data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research this month revealed deforestation spiked 88 per cent in June compared with the same period last year. Bolsonaro claimed the data was false and fired the acclaimed physicist who headed the agency.
"We cannot accept sensationalism or the disclosure of inaccurate numbers that cause great damage to Brazil's image," Bolsonaro said.
The sacking led to an international outcry. Last week, Bolsonaro accused Germany of trying to "buy" the Amazon.
"I would like to give a message to the beloved Angela Merkel," Bolsonaro told Brazilian media. "Take your dough and reforest Germany, okay? It's much more needed there than here."
He also criticised Norway for its oil and whale hunting industries. But he tweeted a bloody video of a "grind," a hunting technique characteristic of Denmark's Faroe Islands, not Norway.
The decision of Norway and Germany to pull aid has left local leaders scrambling to strike a deal with the European countries that bypasses Brasilia.
Governors of the nine Amazon states said in a statement that they "regretted that the position of the Brazilian government had led to a suspension of resources," and they hoped to preside directly over the funds.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro's critics at home celebrated the decision to cut aid.
"These countries are right, it is the government that is wrong," former Brazilian environmental minister Marina Silva told the magazine Epoca. "The minute the government proposed using the funds to regulate illegally occupied land, not only did they defy the objective of the fund, but they financed actions that would contribute to the destruction of the rainforest."
Simone White, 28, is the fifth tourist to have died after becoming ill last week.