You can see North Dakota’s oil fracking fields from space

If you look at the NASA satellite photo above, you can pick out, in the generally dark western plains, a weird clump of lights up near the Canadian border.

Those are the fracking fields of the Bakken oil boom.

Here’s a close up:

NPR’s Robert Krulwich points out that sometimes these lights are “almost as bright as the Aurora Borealis.” What a handy signal to alien races that they should have nothing to do with us.