terafire

It was for the Sydney fires of 2013 that we first used the term megafire. Unfamiliarity meant that we spelled it mega-fire or mega fire and used quotes around it to show that it was new.  We were also not clear what we meant by it except that it referred to a very large fire, a fire that no one could control.

Australian fire scientists have initiated a move to settle on a standard definition.  It is agreed globally that a megafire burns through more than 10,000 hectares of land.  But in recent years we have had fires that are much bigger than that and so a new term was needed, the gigafire, to refer to a fire that burns through more than 100,000 hectares of land. The Black Summer fires of 2020-2021 qualify as a series of gigafires.  The giga- prefix means ‘giant’.

We certainly hope that we won’t need to use the term terafire, a fire burning through more than 1 million hectares.  The tera- prefix means ‘monster’. Although the NSW 2019-21 fire burned 24.3–33.8 million hectares, this was divided into 15 gigafires and 15 megafires.  A single fire burning 1 million hectares would truly be a monster.