The modern world has never seen anything quite like these Australia fires.

About 16 million acres have burned in New South Wales and Victoria, where the crisis is centered. That’s an area about the size of West Virginia. Millions more acres have burned in other parts of the country.

What sets these blazes apart, in terms of their size, is that they are happening in populated areas. Until now, fires this large happened mostly in places like northern Canada or Siberia, where few people live and blazes burn largely uncontrolled.

“What we’re seeing in Australia, in a completely different environment, are fires that are approaching or even exceeding the magnitude of things that we only saw in the most remote forested regions in the world,” said Ross Bradstock, the director of the Center for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales.

“We’re looking at a globally significant fire season in Australia,” he added.

The numbers from Australia dwarf those from some of the most high-profile fires in recent years.

The bushfires in southeastern Australia this season have burned about eight times as much land as the 2018 fires in California, which covered nearly two million acres and were the worst in that state’s recorded history. They are also far larger than the estimates of 2.2 million acres burned by September last year in the Amazon basin, where farmers, some emboldened by the policies of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, ignited tens of thousands of fires to clear land.