Deforestation more dangerous than meteor

I’ve heard a lot of people mention how many football fields of forest disappear every second/ hour/day. I don’t know about others, but I personally didn’t have the remotest idea of the actual size of a football field until I wrote this post. According to our resident football expert, Maarten, there isn’t even a standard size. So why do we keep talking about football fields? It helps visualize, since most people, unlike me, have a clue. According to FIFA , the average size of a football field is 7000m2. If a football field disappears every two seconds, it means that we lose every day at least 302 million square metres of forests. That’s a lot.

Here’s another not-so-fun fact: exactly a century ago today, a meteor flattened an area of forest of 2 billion square meters in Siberia. It is know as the Tunguska meteor (but to be perfectly honest, the exact nature of this object is still debated).

Compare those two sets of data. It takes less than a week (6.61 days to be precise) for humans to chop down 2 billion square meters of forests. So in a week, humans can cause more destruction than a ball of fire coming from outer space. In the space of a century, this makes deforestation 55219 times more dangerous than meteors.

Now, that’s visualization.

 

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