Watch Fracking Gas Flares Light Up the Earth at Night
​Screengrab: ​SkyTruth

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Watch Fracking Gas Flares Light Up the Earth at Night

Sometimes it takes a wide-angle lens to get perspective.

It's one thing to read about the ​staggering amount of greenhouse gases that fracking wells release into the atmosphere; it's another to see the scale of the mess with your own two eyes.

The environmental watchdog group SkyTruth created ​an interactive map that shows all of the nightly gas flares—from which excess natural gas is released and burned—around the world in 2014. When you see it from a wide angle, it makes it pretty easy to see why climate change-exacerbating methane leakage is an increasingly severe problem in the states and across the globe.