Photographs taken on a flight from Dallas, Texas to Salt Lake City, Utah showed wildfires raging across the Texas Panhandle on Tuesday 27 February.
Fueled by dry and unusually warm weather, a massive blaze has ravaged over 250,000 acres in the region, prompting widespread evacuations, road closures, and thick smoke engulfing the area.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire, now the largest among multiple wildfires in northern Texas, has rapidly expanded since igniting on Monday afternoon, exacerbated by red-flag conditions indicating extreme fire behaviour.
As of Tuesday evening, the Smokehouse Creek Fire ranks as the fifth-largest wildfire in Texas history, surpassing the total area burned by all fires in the state last year.
It has also forced a nuclear weapons plant to shut down.