This is interesting. It's a time-lapse sequence from the space station over several night-time overflights of the planet.
It goes by so quickly that you can't quite make out exactly where you are at any given time. Given that, you are likely to miss that there is something very odd that shows up in western North Dakota, a cluster of lights that doesn't belong there. And that wasn't there six years ago.
Look at the upper left corner of that picture. That looks like a city larger than Chicago out there in the flat plains farmland of ... North Dakota?. What the fuck?
It turns out that it's not a new city after all. It's fracking oil wells, with the natural gas being burnt off. Burnt off. Oil companies exploiting the Bakken Shales by fracking are allowed to just burn off the natural gas that comes up along with the oil. Some locals call it "Kuwait on the Prairie".
NPR has the whole story and it's not a pretty one...
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