Oil Refinery, Ras Tanurah, Saudi Arabia

Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie

Gas flares fire the night at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanurah refinery, north of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Each day sparkling towers here produce more than half a million barrels of refined petroleum, the largest output of any refinery in the Middle East.

(Photo shot on assignment for "Saudi Arabia—Beyond the Sands of Mecca," January 1966, National Geographic magazine)