Scientists said that the fires raging Brazil this year have led to a significant amount of the world’s largest tropical wetland getting lost.

The fires have engulfed over 10 percent of the Brazilian wetlands, known as the Pantanal, exacting a toll that scientists refer to as unprecedented.

These fires are often set by ranchers and farmers to clear land. However, in recent times they have been exacerbated by unusually dry conditions.

In 2005, 4,608 square miles burned in the biome. This was the previous record.

In times when the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted the attention of the world, the enormous fires in the Amazon and the Pantalal have been overlooked. As per experts, however, this year’s fires have devastated a delicate ecosystem — an extremely diverse habitat on the planet.

‘The fires in the Pantanal this year are really unprecedented,’ Deccan Herald quoted Douglas C. Morton, the chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as saying. ‘It’s a massive area.’

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