This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

It looks like a scene from a dystopian future, but in reality it is the Indonesian island of Sumatra this week – enveloped in a toxic red haze as hundreds of hectares of virgin rainforest have been burned to the ground.

Blanketed in an eerie copper haze, one amateur video has captured skies that would not be out of place in the apocalyptic film Bladerunner 2049.

Posted on Twitter and now viewed more than seven million times, the footage brings home the horror of the fires on the ground, and the reality of living in filthy air.

The surreal footage pans over a street and home covered in a thick, smoky orange-red haze, as a bird incongruously chirps in the background. Behind the camera the person expresses disbelief saying: “Believe it or not, this is daytime mum, just 10 minutes before 1pm.”

Indonesia forest fires spark blame game as smoke closes hundreds of Malaysia schools Read more

The footage was taken in a village in Jambi, Sumatra by primary school teacher Ayu Putri Wijianti, who wanted to share the unusual scene with family and friends on WhatsApp. She started filming on Saturday after she saw the sky turn from yellow to red.

“I was very surprised because the sky went red. It was dark, and the wind was blowing strong. The feeling was that it was another world,” Ayu told the Guardian on Tuesday.

Ayu said the video was not edited and the footage taken was “what it looked like naturally”. In recent days the sky has been yellow in Jambi, but the conditions on Saturday’s gave the sky its copper-red glow, she said.

Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency (BMKG) has explained the Mars-like skies over Jambi as a phenomenon known as “Mie Scattering.”

The red colour is apparently caused by the sunlight being scattered in the air by 0.7-micrometer particles. The BMKG said the pervasive red is produced when the micro-particles of pollutants in the air are equal to the wavelength of visible sunlight.

Forest fires are an annual occurrence in Indonesia, a result of slash and burn techniques used to quickly and cheaply clear land for mostly oil palm plantations, but this year, due to a protracted drought, they are more severe.

The crisis has pushed air pollution indexes off the charts in Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo, forced the cancellation of scores of flights, the closure of hundreds of schools across Indonesia and Malaysia, caused diplomatic tensions, and made hundreds of thousands of people sick.

On Monday, Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency said that almost one million people were suffering from acute respiratory infections caused by the haze and forest fires.

