Which was the most destructive forest fire of all time?

In 2003, one of the hottest summers in Europe, 47 million acres of land was involved in the largest forest fire in the world in what has become known as the Siberian Taiga Fires. On one day in June of 2003, a US satellite recorded 157 fires across almost 11m hectares (about 27 million acres).

A smoke plume from the fires reached Kyoto, Japan 5,000 kilo meters (3,107 miles) away. The word taiga is a Russian word that also means boreal forest or swampy, moist forest. Boreal forests are the earth’s most common and overall largest land-based biome.