America has got itself all confused by geography again. A map produced by NBC News, suggests that pretty much the whole of Australia has been ablaze this week.
According to NBC, vast swathes of Cape York, the entire Darwin region, and vast portions of Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert are in cinders.
The worrying map
But the major cartographical catastrophe is actually an error.
The catastrophic bushfires of the past week have in fact been confined largely to New South Wales, contrary to NBC's reporting.
In all likelihood, NBC took the image from a Geoscience Australia product called Sentinel, The Herald Sun wrote.
Sentinel is a national bushfire monitoring system which uses satellite data to enable emergency service managers and other users to identify fire locations across Australia.
At any given time, the map will show hazard reduction burns, bushfires which pose no threat to life or property, plus of course much more serious bushfires like the ones hitting Australia this week.
NBC appears to have mistakenly taken every fire on the Sentinel map and assumed they are all part of the current emergency.
The network has also more or less assumed that the whole of Australia is NSW, theaustralian.com.au shrewdly reported: "Which is disturbing given the network spent pretty much the whole of the Sydney Olympics camped on the Opera House steps."
"Maybe all those kangaroos hopping down George Street left them a little muddled or something," the publication noted.
