View from an airplane

There’s generally not much to see from the window of an airplane, other than right after takeoff and before landing. Most of my flight Monday afternoon was above the clouds, so that was all I could see. Monday evening and Friday morning (very early morning, well before sunrise) there was nothing much to see because it was dark out (and in any case I didn’t have a window seat either time). But the second flight Friday, from Denver back to Moline, I had a window seat and a clear view of the ground the whole way.

I had noticed on Monday, before we got up into the clouds, how brown most of the land looked. I knew of course that farmers were in the middle of harvest, so it made sense, but I’m used to seeing more green when I look down at the earth from above. On Friday, I did see fields that were green, but what really surprised me was how many of them were round. I had never been especially observant of farms in our region, but I was pretty sure the fields were generally roughly rectangular, except where forests got in the way.

I could see lines – roads, I assume – marking off large square areas there in Colorado, but many of the squares had circles inscribed within them. Some of the circles were green, but even the ones that were brown were a much lighter color than the rest of the square. Why, I wondered, would farmers choose to plant their crops in a circle, rather than utilizing the entire square? The overall effect reminded me of an Othello playing board.

Back home later, I looked it up (easy to find discussions of it, since I was far from the only one to wonder about it), and found out that in that part of the country, center pivot irrigation has made it practical to farm areas that previously had not been worth planting. The center pivot irrigation system, naturally, produces a circular field (or half-circle in a few cases, based on my photos). Now I’m curious why some fields do appear to be square or rectangular, and how farmers decide which irrigation system to use.

After a while, I started noticing another feature to the land we were passing over. There were still some circles, but there were also areas that I assumed must be hills, though I had not imagined hills having such intricate patterns. Seen from so high up, with little indication of the scale of what I saw, these hills – or whatever they were – reminded me a bit of fern leaves (except that they were gray rather than green). I didn’t imagine that I could later figure out exactly where we were at that point, but I thought a photo might enable me to find out just what those formations were.

As it happens, spending a while looking at Google Earth enabled me to pinpoint an area that so closely matches my photo that I’m fairly confident it is the same spot. I started out zooming in just enough to find Colorado and Nebraska, then zoomed in further to find an area that had the same sort of look. There’s quite a bit of it, and I didn’t expect to be able to find a match on my photo, but the juxtaposition of circular fields in a line next to these hills, and the fact that one of the fields looked like Pac-Man made me think it just might be possible. And before long, there it was!

Outlined portion is shown in greater detail below. It does not match my photo perfectly, and of course my photo is looking out the airplane window instead of straight down, but so many of the features match that I don’t think there are two spots that similar.

For a while I read my book instead of looking out the window, but at one point, when I knew we must be over Iowa since it wasn’t that long before we were supposed to reach Moline, I noticed a body of water with what could only be a dam at one end, with a narrow channel of water leading away from it. I quickly took a picture on my phone, hoping to be able to figure out the dam’s location using the photo.

Wikipedia gave me a list of dams in Iowa, and a search for images of dams in Iowa showed me that Red Rock Dam (near Pella) might be a possibility. The photos didn’t seem to match all that well with the photo on my phone, though. I checked the time stamp on the photo, compared it with another taken shortly before landing, estimated average airspeed from Denver to Moline, and that did work out to about the distance from Pella to Moline.

So I brought up Google Earth and zoomed in on Iowa. Once I found Pella, it wasn’t too hard to find Red Rock Dam. I zoomed in further, and was both surprised and pleased to see just how well the details matched my photo.

I don’t expect to take another trip by plane in the near future (next year’s conference is much closer, so driving would be feasible), so I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to take pictures from the air. But it certainly gave me a new appreciation of software like Google Earth, as well as an increased interest in geography.