Astronomy

Pioneer Rig No. 29
THE STARRY SKIES of lonesome West Texas have inspired
many a cowboy poet. But more recently, the country has become
better known for its pumpjacks and its vast resources beneath
the ground.
The Permian Basin is a vast reach of New Mexico and Texas
home to one of the nation’s greatest fossil fuel deposits. The
boom of recent years in American oil and gas drilling and hydraulic
fracturing — now on the decline — brought bright flames and
facilities for transporting fuel and housing workers.
These oil fields glow at night because drilling and refinery
operations burn off vast amounts of gas to maintain proper pressure
or simply because the flammables are too tough to transport.
Billions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuels are lost to the practice
every year. Floodlights and portable light towers are also found
throughout the oil fields.
This light pollution seeps into Big Bend National Park, another
of the recently minted Dark-Sky Parks.
McDonald Observatory in the nearby Davis Mountains also
looks out onto the Permian Basin. And in 2011, the Texas
Legislature passed a law mandating shields on outdoor lights
throughout the counties surrounding the observatory. But that
didn’t stop the counties to its north from granting some
5,000 oil-drilling permits between 2010 and 2015.
The flares aren’t the biggest problem, either.
Stacey Locke says he, too, learned to love the night under
these heavens. So, as fights erupted between night-sky proponents
and drilling companies, Locke — the CEO and president of
Pioneer Energy Services, which provides contract drilling services
— has become an unlikely ally of the observatory.
In recent years, Locke has teamed with veteran McDonald
Observatory astronomer Bill Wren on a plan to protect the heavens
and the oil exploration. They started with a single, typical site
— Rig No. 29. Even the workers there were unhappy with the
lighting conditions because of glare from “360 lights,” an
unshielded, blast-resistant lamp that cast a dangerous glare on
instrument panels. The workers had crammed a rag into the wire
mesh around the light to help block some of the stray light.
Similar skyglow problems plagued the stairwell.
The study Wren and Locke published based on their work at
Rig No. 29 showed that not only could they improve dark skies in
West Texas, they could also reduce costs and make oil drilling
safer for workers.
They’re often in remote places with
little nearby development and relatively
few visitors. Those parks never had a lot
of lighting to begin with. In contrast,
the Grand Canyon had nearly 5 million
visitors in 2015. And it’s also home to a
town of park workers.
“This is really in many respects
unlike any Dark-Sky Park application
we’ve dealt with before,” says Barentine.
And the herculean effort is even
more remarkable because it comes at a
time when Grand Canyon National Park
is already facing a multibillion-dollar
backlog in maintenance work to repair
leaky water supply pipes and antiquated
infrastructure. Other National Park
Service sites face similar problems.
Dark skies for all parks
But if funding allows, the standards
developed at Grand Canyon will be
rolled out across the parks system.
Anyone with an iPad can now theoretically
go out into the field and catalog
lights, creating an actionable database.
“They would like to get to a model
where essentially almost every national
park unit short of the ones that are in
urban settings would qualify to become a
Dark-Sky Park under the IDA program
because they’ve put a standard set of policies
in place,” Barentine says. “They
would standardize the application process
to the IDA.”
With no nearby cities, Utah’s Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, situated just north of the
Grand Canyon, has some of America’s darkest skies. HARUN MEHMEDINOVIC/SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM
That could help protect these darksky
sanctuaries in perpetuity. Even
remote-sounding national parks like
Rocky Mountain and Joshua Tree have
seen light pollution encroach from
nearby cities. The problems now also
include Alaska’s remote North Slope and
the desolate Bakken region centered in
North Dakota. The boom in production
has created jobs in the previously unpopulated
region. And that new residential
and commercial infrastructure is bringing
new lights near Theodore Roosevelt
National Park. The impact is most obvious
when seen from space. NASA photos
show how the Bakken region became one
of the brightest regions in the West in
just a few short years. Its skyglow rivals
that of large metropolitan areas. The
same is true of shale oil fields in Texas.
(See “Pioneer Rig No. 29,” above.)
“The place you are in is special, but it
shouldn’t be in a sense,” Barentine says
to a group of skywatchers standing near
Mather Point. “Of course, the Grand
Canyon is great and we can’t reproduce
it everywhere on Earth, but the night
sky over the Grand Canyon is something
that we can bring back if we so choose to
do that.”