I have flown over Australia a number of times and have been profoundly puzzled by what I saw. What were these shapes and patterns, what did they represent. They looked so different to the views flying over North America, Europe, Africa or Asia; long straight lines for miles and miles, strange curved lines, and river like patterns but where rivers only flow once every seven years. And at last I think I begin to understand. When I fly over Europe I see cities (well not much of that in the outback for a start) and fields, forests, lakes and occasionally jagged mountains. Over Australia I see geology. The continent is old, sits on its own continental plate with no plate boundaries and, other than some now extinct volcanic activity in the south-east, some 40 million years ago,when it bid farewell to Antarctica and started a long slow journey to Asia it has been geologically stable and quiet for some 400 million years. So its jagged mountains were worn down to vast plains of erosional debris and then there was a general uplift and much of the debris was itself eroded and what you have left is naked geology in a land with too little rain for forests and fields, and too little erosion from rain and rivers and ice; it is mostly warm to hot now and the predominantly red rocks indicate it has been predominantly warm and hot and dry for much of its history; so even occasional rivers leave their mark for there is too little erosion and too little vegetation to cover them during the dry times. So what you see is geology, long straight lines of worn down strata tilted on their edge hundreds of millions of years ago, curves where the strata suffered some folding in those dim distant orogenies (mountain building episodes … plate boundaries before it was a plate continent), fossil river systems and even fossil sand dunes where there is just enough vegetation to fix them. And after the uplift shallow sunken depressions where fossil rivers occasionally fill and drain  inland to stranded lakes only to dry out again without reaching the sea.

So some more images from 10000 metres or 1.75 metres, and again only limited touch ups in photoshop; not wholesale distortion.

Is it a bird, is it a plane …

So the shapes are fascinating, even through the limited view and photographic options of an airplane window, and so geological … well mostly; I cannot work out what caused this shape but it will be natural as I have seen similar in too many disparate locations in unpopulated areas to explain it by human action. Though perhaps you know better?