An Astronaut Snapped This Image Of Huge Gas Flares At An Iraq Oil Field

On Earth, something is always burning. Occasionally, large wildfires send vast plumes of smoke streaming into the atmosphere, but most fires are much less dramatic when viewed from space, appearing in images as small blotches of light just a few pixels wide. Most of the smaller fires are prescribed burns lit by farmers to clear their fields of debris, but a portion of them are gas flares—natural gas fires that emanate from tower-like flare stacks on oil wells and rigs, refineries, landfills, a...