NewsTracker Answers for week of Oct. 19, 2026

Q: After using troops, water bombing, and cloud seeding to battle island wildfires spreading toxic smoke across Southeast Asia, Indonesia dispersed 1.5 tons of dry ice over one of its cities last week in a desperate attempt to clear the air. Where is Indonesia?

Circle the area on this map

Q: Toxic smoke and wildfires are common during the May-October dry season on Indonesia’s 13,000 to 17,000 islands along the equator. What made this year’s fires so much worse?

A. Deforestation

B. Mining

C. Plantations

D. Super El Niño

D. Record-high ocean temperatures supercharged this year’s weather event in the Pacific Ocean, which triggers intense storms in some areas and droughts in other places. This year’s El Niño is believed to be the strongest ever recorded and dried Indonesia’s forests and peatlands, which burned out of control.

Q: While a super El Niño intensified this year’s toxic haze, decades of slash-and-burn clearing of Indonesian rainforest for mining and agriculture fed the annual wildfires and smoke. What is the major crop grown on the cleared land?

A. Coconut palms

B. Pineapples

C. Oil palms

D. Olive trees

C. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of palm oil, which is used in food manufacturing, in beauty products, and as biodiesel fuel. Oil palms grow in the same tropical areas as rainforests. Drainage canals for oil palm plantations helped dry out the peatlands now burning.

Q: Peat bogs store centuries of carbon, and burning peatlands releases that carbon into the warming atmosphere. Melting glaciers and warming water are raising sea levels. What Indonesian city is sinking faster than any other big city?

A. Jakarta

B. Jayapura

C. Nusantara

D. Palembang

A. Jakarta, on the most populous island of Java, is Indonesia’s largest city and current capital. Because Jakarta is sinking and flooding, Indonesia is building Nusantara on Borneo as its new capital. Jayapura is the largest city in Western New Guinea, and Palembang is the city on Sumatra where the dry ice was dropped from a plane.

Q: Most wildfires are burning on Sumatra, Borneo, and New Guinea. Indonesia shares the world’s second-largest island with Papua New Guinea. Which nation shares the island of Borneo with Indonesia?

A. Brunei

B. Myanmar

C. Thailand

D. Timor-Leste

A. Brunei is on the northern coast of Borneo and is bordered by Malaysia, which also shares the world’s third-largest island with Indonesia. Brunei is a sultanate and the only sovereign state entirely on Borneo.