What an absolute atrocity of a title.
In one of the later Heinlein novels (in what we'll politely call his "Incest Philosopher" phase and move on), the protagonists come to an unknown world and, eager for signs of life, they start scanning rivers and coastlines. Our kind of life needs to have water somewhere close by so it's usually a good bet to scan the edges of water. It's an obvious enough point but it hadn't occurred to me before then that you could excavate a map for insight and ever since I've enjoyed reading maps and trying to fit all the disparate pieces together.
A Quick Global Tour
I like starwatching--I'm working on memorizing the 12 zodiac constellations--so I use light pollution maps to find good lookouts. Some places look about like you'd expect. Texas, for example, has two gaping sores in Houston and the DFW metroplex along with a real bad rash south of San Antonio that I suspect corresponds to the Eagle Ford Shale Play.
New Zealand, on the other hand, is still more or less empty and enjoys some of the clearest and most beautiful skies in the world.
It starts getting interesting when you consider the stories the light tells. North Korea, for example, is also low on the light pollution scale but for altogether more horrifying reasons than New Zealand:
Back in the United States
Consider the United States. No surprise the East Coast is densely settled, especially around the original colonies and DC while Chicago, the great transportation hub, outshines its rust belt neighbors. The transportation grid is visible under the light. Across much of the continental interior towns are consistently spaced about 30 miles apart. That was the distance a man on horseback could ride in a day and you can see the echoes of that traveler's journey in the web of lights wrapping the continent. There's also...a sharp dividing line straight down the middle of the country a good ways east of the Rockies. Nature doesn't care for straight lines as a rule so what's going on there?
My first thought was that we were looking at the western edge of the Mississippi River Valley (MRV), but the MRV forms a bowl structure that sprawls across most of the continent before funneling down to New Orleans where it dumps biblical quantities of sediment into the Gulf. It looks like this:
The second possibility is that it's an interstate. I-25, to be precise, a noble artifact of the Cold War runs more or less along the Mid-Western ridge of American light pollution. But correlation doesn't equal causation. Here is a physical map of the United States:
And now it come together. We've been looking at the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. While the Mountains themselves are further west, they keep moisture from passing easy for hundreds of miles. So that all makes sense.
But maybe, like me, you noticed the massive red and white sore in North Dakota of all places. North Dakota has a population of 3/4 million across the entire state. Why is it lit up like that?
Robert Krulwich
It turns out NPR's Robert Krulwich had the same question about a decade ago:
What we have here is an immense and startlingly new oil and gas field — nighttime evidence of an oil boom created by a technology called fracking. Those lights are rigs, hundreds of them, lit at night, or fiery flares of natural gas. One hundred fifty oil companies, big ones, little ones, wildcatters, have flooded this region, drilling up to eight new wells every day on what is called the Bakken formation. Altogether, they are now producing 660,000 barrels a day — double the output two years ago — so that in no time at all, North Dakota is now the second-largest oil producing state in America.
Imagine being a Dakotan when the oil rush started. It's a hot summer day, still but for the drone of the cicadas, when a dull roar announces a flood of F150s. An army of oilmen stream over the horizon and down every country road unfurling temp buildings and strip malls behind them.Roughnecks and rigs sprout over every oil-producing patch of land like the world's least organized ant hive. Night falls for the last time, it's dark, then a second day erupts as hundreds of whispering gas spouts flare like new stars.