Australia is now sending firefighting support to France, where hellish wildfires are breaking devastating records.

“The situation we face today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since the Second World War,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.

The vast megafires ripping through southwestern France are burning so intensely that they have created a powerful, fire-generated thunderstorm.

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Macron called the fires “totally unprecedented” for the nation.

Víctor Resco de Dios, a lecturer of forestry engineering and global change at the University of Lleida in Spain said, “We have entered an era of fires that cannot be extinguished.”

Wildfires in France have now scorched more than 1600sqkm, making them the largest on record for France.

The fires have raged near major cities in both France and Spain, including one which has torn through the mountainous province of Avila, west of the Spanish capital Madrid.

Australia will send a firefighting chopper, which can fight fires at night, and is equipped with a 11,300L water tank, along with a reconnaissance and support aircraft, and 24 aerial and ground crew from the NSW Rural Fire Service.

Wildfires in France have now scorched more than 1600sqkm. Credit: Reuters

“Australia has some of the finest fire-fighting capability on the planet and we are only too happy to do whatever we can to assist, just as France came to our aid during the 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires,” Minister for Emergency Management Kristy McBain said.

“Having seen firsthand the severe impacts bushfires have had on both my own community and many others across Australia, my heart goes out to the people of France.”

The deployment will take place in the coming days, according the Defence Department.

“The scale of these fires is immense, and it is in moments like these that the strength of our partnership and solidarity is most evident,” Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong said.

Minister for Defence Richard Marles said: “We are proud to be supporting them now during their time of need.”

Fire clouds form self-feeding firestorms

Fire clouds, or “pyrocumulonimbus”, have appeared in the skies above France’s Gironde region, near Bordeaux, according to authorities.

Fire clouds emerge when particularly intense wildfires generate a plume of extreme heat, which rises rapidly into the cooler air above and condenses into towering thunderstorm clouds.

These can create their own wind, rain and lightning and transform blazes into erratic and unpredictable self-feeding firestorms.

This rare phenomenon is sometimes seen during the kinds of megafires that afflict Australia, the US and Canada, but is not at all common in Europe.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts said it could not yet say for certain this was France’s first pyrocumulonimbus.

“However, if confirmed, its development would highlight the exceptional intensity of the current fire and the extraordinary atmospheric conditions under which it is burning,” the centre’s fire forecast coordinator Francesca Di Giuseppe said.

There are still months of wildfire season left, and it could take that long to extinguish the fires currently burning.

Climate change ambivalence and ‘Dantean scenarios’

Pollution from wildfires is estimated to cause more than 100,000 deaths globally every year.

The megafires raging near French tourist hotspots, wine-growing regions and vital defence hubs also threaten to cause huge economic damage.

Scientists say we should expect fires, in Europe as elsewhere, to become more frequent in the future, and more extreme, as long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and push up temperatures.

“It’s difficult to predict how far things might go,” Resco de Dios said.

“We will soon be unable to rule out Dantean scenarios like those seen in California or Australia, with fires or fire complexes reaching hundreds of thousands of hectares or even a million hectares.”

Layered satellite images show a cloud of smoke over southwest France on Monday. Credit: NASA Worldview

Global warming is bringing stronger swings between wet and dry extremes, which Matthew Jones, an independent research fellow at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England described as a “whiplash effect”.

Last winter was unusually wet in France and Spain, leading a surge in vegetation growth. Then the weather flipped.

Since May, Western Europe has been roiled by a succession of brutal heat waves, which parched the landscape.

This heat provided “the ‘crack of the whip’ in the whiplash effect, turning that dense vegetation into highly combustible fuel”, Jones said.

A rare multinational wildfire crisis

Wildfires have scorched not only France and Spain, but also Turkey and Greece.

Both France and Spain have requested EU assistance, and Stefan Doerr, director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at Swansea University in Wales said: “A synchronised, multinational wildfire crisis is rare in Europe”.

More than 300,000 people have been evacuated across the two countries so far, though some were able to begin returning to their homes on Wednesday.

“What is uncommon is the current number of destructive wildfires: fires that spread rapidly, overwhelm fire brigades and force communities to evacuate,” Imperial College London professor of fire science Guillermo Rein said.

Wildfires in Turkey have also begun to pick up, with fires spreading in agricultural and forested areas of the southwestern Mugla province on the Aegean coast.

In neighbouring Greece, at least three firefighters have been killed. Two died battling flames on Crete and a third while tackling a blaze in Gythio, the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency (AMNA) reported, citing the Greek Fire Service officials.