(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE WORLD'S attention is focused on oil again. But all the easy deposits have been found, and the hunt for new ones is becoming harder, riskier, and costlier. It sends men to the highland peaks of New Guinea, to the boundless sands of Oman, to the frozen tundra of Alaska. Some people see these explorers as despoilers of the universe. The roustabouts, drillers, and geologists see themselves, through a haze of fatigue and dirt, as just guys working hard in strange places to make a lot of money. Both these views miss something essential about the quest for crude -- the great adventure of it -- which photographer George Steinmetz captures in these pages. Trained as a geophysicist, Steinmetz briefly explored for oil in Alaska and Mexico before turning to the camera as his profession. He spent two years traveling to the ends of the world under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society to get these pictures. They show that on an earth overrun by man and technology, there are still remote places whose exploration means excitement, hardship, danger -- and the exhilarating possibility of a new field while the price of crude keeps gushing.