Fires on East Falkland Island

Position of center of photo (Lat/Long): [-51.7/-57.85]

The capital city, Stanley, lies on the eastern tip of East Falkland. The local inhabitants are mainly English speakers, and interestingly, the islands have become a center of English-language learning for students from South America.

The windy and relatively dry climate, which includes roughly 600 millimeters (24 inches) of precipitation annually, has given rise to natural vegetation comprised of treeless grassland with scattered bogs. The grasslands are ideal for sheep rearing - the dominant occupation until recent decades, when fishing (mainly squid for Spain) and tourism became the mainstays of the economy. These expanses of grassland provide ready fuel for fires, as indicated by the several long smoke plumes visible in this astronaut photograph. This near-nadir image (looking almost straight down) was acquired at the southernmost extent of the International Space Station’s latitudinal orbit range of approximately 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south relative to the surface of the Earth.