Active Fires
One month of fire on one globe — Africa's great savanna burning season, boreal wildfires, and harvest burning, all aglow at once.
Drag to spin — this is what yours looks like folded.
About this globe
Every fire detected from orbit during July 2026 — each glowing point counts the fires MODIS spotted in a thousand-square-kilometer cell. The bright band across southern Africa is the planet's biggest regular burning event: the savanna fire season, most of it deliberate agricultural burning that happens every dry season.
Look north for a different kind of fire — wildfires scattered through the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia — and notice what does not burn: the Sahara has nothing left to burn, and the wet Amazon interior resists (its fire season peaks later, in September).
How the data was captured
MODIS on NASA's Terra satellite detects the thermal signature of fires actively burning at the moment it passes overhead; a month of daily detections is accumulated into counts per grid cell. Land silhouette added by us for context.
Data: NASA Earth Observations (MODIS active fire detections) →
Download free — pick your paper size
Print at 100% scale. Cut along solid lines, fold along dashed lines, glue the tabs. Your PDF can take up to a minute to prepare — hang tight after clicking.
In the US? Print the A4 file and choose “fit to page” — it scales cleanly onto Letter paper.
Sharing this globe?
Free for personal use, classrooms, and gifts — not for resale. If you post it on your site or share it online, please credit Folding Globes with a link. Copy-paste blurb:
"Active Fires" folding paper globe — free from Folding Globes, https://foldingglobes.com/globes/active-fires · Data: NASA Earth Observations (MODIS active fire detections)
Make it yours
Every paid shape also lets you pin your own places on the map.