America from above

It has been almost always cloudy when I fly somewhere. When I started my long journey from Istanbul to Los Angeles it was clear at the very beginning but things changed soon and northern Europe and Greenland were below thick layer of clouds, as always. But it changed when I was flying over northern Canada and weather remained calm and clear until the end. So I had an opportunity to do some aerial photography of interesting features or noteworthy places. It was great fun and made the second part of this 14-hour flight an enjoyable tour of American geology.

This is Canada. The most striking thing is the immense number of lakes. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever counted them. We flew several hours over vast expanses of bogs, lakes and forests but I saw very few traces of man-made structures like roads, crop fields or towns. Almost nothing. This part of Northern America resembles northern Scandinavia but dimensions are much different. The rugged outline of the lake and lots of islands indicate that it is surrounded by hard crystalline rocks.

Now we are over southern Canada and the scene is very different. Straight lines and rectangles clearly demonstrate that this landscape is influenced by intelligent beings who are in love with euclidean geometry. There are crop fields waiting for the spring to arrive and lots of other man-made structures.

Nicely meandering river with oxbow lakes. It is still probably somewhere in southern Canada. Update from a comment written by Howard Allen: It is the junction of the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers, east of Prince Albert, in central Saskatchewan (53.235305, -105.083257). Interesting geological note, just a few miles to the east of this point is the very interesting Fort a la Corne kimberlite complex, one of the best-preserved kimberlite volcano complexes in the world.

This mountainous scene is located in Montana, USA. It is probably Beartooth mountain range where is located the geologically famous Stillwater igneous complex.

Another geological hot spot — Yellowstone Lake.

Nice isolated mountain but I don’t know the name of it or where exactly it is located. It has to be somewhere between Yellowstone and Great Salt Lake. Update by Howard Allen: It is Blacktail Butte, north of Jackson, Wyoming (43.636993, -110.691438).

Another meandering river but this one is already free of ice cover.

And yet another sign of a rapidly approaching spring. Southern slopes of mountains are already free of snow while the northern slopes are snow-covered.

Utah Lake and city of Provo behind it. Provo is a hometown of this website. Servers that host Sandatlas are located in this city.

There are some reddish cliffs in the background. This is probably sandstone of the Colorado plateau.

Lake Mead.

Probably Kelso Dunes already in California.

When one tries to connect these points with a line it becomes apparent that it is not straight. It is normal that shortest flight paths appear to be curved on a two-dimensional map but the curvature needs to be convex in this case, not concave. Already when flying I noticed that we deflect to the left from the ideal course. I expected to see the entire Great Salt Lake but we actually flew over Salt Lake City and the lake was on another side of the plane. I think it is so because we were flying around the Edwards Air Force Base in California which is closed for commercial airplanes.