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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I was looking at North America as a whole, and noticed a very bright spot in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. It's almost one of the biggest spots. Wikipedia tells me it has a population of basically 2000 people. Why is it so light?

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Oilfield flaring, Google has videos: https://www.google.com/search?q=Prudhoe+Bay+gas+flaring

"...however, at any given time, several thousand transient workers support the Prudhoe Bay oil field."

The bright spot is bigger than the bright spot over Paris and London though. Do they just leave the lights on 24/7 in the bay?

Prudhoe is a massive oilfield. It's thousands of wells spread covering an area around 200k acres. Every well pad and facility has lighting.

Oilfields operate 24/7 so the lights are always on. Of course there's ~24 hours of daylight for half the year on the North Slope and ~24 hours of darkness in winter.

Oil installations are extremely well lit.

Oil flares.

Oil industry. Same reason western North Dakota looks like a major metropolitan area.

I saw this same thing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...

"Many farmers in North Dakota can't prevent drillers from drilling — even if they'd like to. Decades ago, the rights to the minerals below those farms were separated from the rights to the land itself — which is why today, energy companies can move in, create drilling pads where they please, move in trucks and workers, without the farmers' consent."

Am I reading this right? A company can just plop drilling operations on a farmer's land?

That's right. You can't prevent a mineral rights holder from accessing their resources - even if you hold the surface rights. The company developing the minerals has to compensate the surface owner for roads/pads/etc.

Go a little farther south and find Ft McMurray in Alberta, which isn't even traditional oil fields but oilsands excavation. Only about 70k people but it's basically as bright as the 1m people cities to the south of it (and the extra wide halo around Edmonton is likely related to refineries).

Heavy industry is bright I guess.

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