Photos Showing Extent of Canada Wildfire Smoke Captured by Astronaut

Smoke billowing out from the vicious wildfires blazing across Nova Scotia on Canada's eastern coast has been snapped from an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Fires are raging across Halifax Regional Municipality, leading to a local state of emergency. Shelburne and Yarmouth counties have also been hit badly.

The ISS photograph, taken by a member of the Expedition 69 crew, shows the fire near Shelburne on May 29. By May 31, this fire had been burning for four days, and had scorched over 75 square miles, making it the largest forest fire in Nova Scotia's history.

Around 50 homes have since been destroyed, with some 2,300 homes evacuated in the Shelburne County area. Some firefighters have even reported that the flames reached over 300 feet tall.

This comes only weeks after a large number of fires sparked across the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta in the west of the country.

It's thought that these blazes in Nova Scotia grew rapidly due to dry and windy conditions, exacerbated by the fact that the province had an abnormally dry spring, only receiving around half of the usual amount of rainfall across April. The same spate of dry weather and unseasonal heatwaves throughout the spring was also a major driver of the fires in British Columbia and Alberta.

"Everything lined up for a perfect storm, if you will," Tory Rushton, a member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, told CBC on Wednesday. "The dry winter, dry spring, perfectly warm breeze and warm weather in the spring has certainly not helped our province at all with this fire season."

Over 800 square miles of Canadian land had burned as of May 31, 13 times the ten-year average for springtime.

Eight illegal burns were found on Monday by conservation officers across Nova Scotia, leading Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston to urge locals to adhere to the province-wide burn ban.

"Don't be burning right now. No burning in Nova Scotia," Houston said in a Tuesday news conference. "For God's sake, stop burning. Stop flicking your cigarette butts out your car window. Just stop it."

Smoke from the blazes has been blown southwards towards the U.S., as seen in the NASA image, leading to air quality alerts being issued on May 30 in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, with the National Weather Service having issued a Code Orange air quality alert for Philadelphia.

Shaun Hatfield, a municipal councilor in Barrington, told CBC that local firefighters were surprised by the strength and power of the blazes, especially the one near Halifax.

"They've never really seen a fire move with as voracious an appetite as this one," he said. "It seems insatiable. It seems to be spreading faster than any of us imagined."

Temperatures are expected to spike to over 86 F over the rest of the week, giving little respite to firefighters and risking further blazes emerging. Firefighters are arriving from New York and New Hampshire on June 3 to help fight the blazes, according to an update from the Nova Scotia government.

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