A fire at a sulfur mine in Iraq

If this fire was a volcano, it would already be among the largest eruptions of 2016.

In June 2003, atmospheric scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, used satellites to track how much sulfur dioxide streamed into the atmosphere from a fire at a sulfur mine and processing facility near Mosul, Iraq. They calculated that the fire at Al-Mishraq, which burned for nearly a month, released 21 kilotons of toxic sulfur dioxide per day. That is roughly four times as much as is emitted each day by the world’s largest single-source emitter of sulfur dioxide, a smelter in Noril’sk, Russia.

Thirteen years later, history seems to be repeating itself. A fire at the same sulfur facility in Iraq is emitting tremendous quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Once again, this group of scientists is closely watching the events in real time—only this time they have a more capable set of satellite instruments at their disposal.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites first detected the heat signature of the fire at Al-Mishraq on October 20, 2016. By the next day, a plume of white smoke was streaming from the facility. Meanwhile, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on Aura and the Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite (OMPS) on Suomi NPP began making observations of a large sulfur dioxide plume spreading across northern and central Iraq. Initially, OMI detected sulfur dioxide in the planetary boundary layer and lower troposphere, the lowest parts of the atmosphere. Over the next few days, the plume responded to shifting winds and reached higher into the atmosphere.

This same facility was on fire in 2003. After nearly a month of burning, the 2003 fire had released roughly 600 kilotons of sulfur dioxide – so much that it was the largest non-volcanic release of sulfur dioxide we had ever observed with satellites.

Pictures showing that there were no gas emissions 19 October.