Australia has a long history of bushfires. The 2019-2020 Black Summer was the worst in recorded history. But was that the worst it could get?
Our new research has reconstructed the past 2,000 years of southeast Australia’s bushfire weather, drawing on evidence of past climates laid down in changing patterns in deep ice in East Antarctica. The high and low pressure weather systems south of Australia are so large they connect the two continents, even though they are more than 3,000 km apart.
