Recently NASA’s Earth Observatory released a beautiful series of images from the dark side of the planet.  However, savvy observers noticed something strange…what was that patch of lights out in the plains of North Dakota?  There’s no big city out there, it’s mostly open grassland.

So what is it?

What we’re dealing with here is an immense new oil and gas field, created by the boom around a technology called fracking.  That mysterious area is illuminated by are the lights and natural gas flares from hundreds of oil rigs. Those lights are proof that the region is literally on fire.