I had the most fascinating flight from China to England. The pilot made an arching loop up north through Mongolia and across Russia. I've done this before but the weather was less than optimal... and at night... and on an aisle seat. This time was a perfect, window-seat opportunity to see what mysteries could be unlocked in the vast emptiness of Asia.

The strange fields

Across Mongolia was vast swathes of desert. At first I assumed this sandy wasteland was just burning wasteland, but I started seeing salt flats that turned out to be sheets of ice across the land, becoming more apparently as the mountain region of the himalayas were coming closer.

But it was rarely as empty as it truly seemed. Very occasionally, I would see some kind of town or desert city, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of nothingness again. There were barely any roads connecting them anywhere, just a single dusty highway heading off to the horizon somewhere. Why was there a town in such a place? Take a closer look:

A first glance, it's just fields. But what are the crops? What are the harvests or the mining materials, even? These fields are vague shadows, ethereal rectangles that seem to serve no apparent purpose... any ideas?

The Inefficient Rivers

I saw a lot of these. Incredibly winding rivers. Seems pretty dumb if you ask me. Why not just cut through the middle and save millions of years of erosion efforts?

This, on the other hand looked very man made, or alien-made. I don't see what the point of this round, wind-swept semi-circle lakes with a strange structure in the middle.

To make it more curious, a close up of this area shows direct, straight lines cutting through it. More on these in a moment:

The Landing Strip

Another town I discovered, after seeing absolutely nothing for a good hour or so of sonic flight speeds across the landscape. Presumably this was the only water supply they could work with, but it was plentiful enough that they even build a landing strip in the area... for what purpose this town exists remains a mystery.

Russia

After Mongolia, we hit Russia and living standards possibly got even more difficult, if that's even possible. Ice, Icy lakes, Icy mountains, and more Ice in an unforgiving flat land extending for hours and hours in any direction, despite going over 500km/h at any given moment.

Again, I can't really explain the round, twisting areas with hundreds of mini, sweeping lakes as if slashed into the ground with a knife.

The Mystery Lines

This is throwing me off big time, and if anybody can even begin to postulate what these could be, I'd love to hear ideas. I started seeing strange, straight lines extending for dozens of miles at a time. They weren't deeply cut through the landscape like the train tracks or roads we flew over, nor were they observably near any civilisation.

I thought I was imagining it at first; every photo I took wouldn't be high enough quality to make them obviously visible. I was worried I'd never be able to take a snap to show that they were truly there. Was I going mad?

Finally, I found some of the gridlines coated in ice, thus making them reflective and more obvious. Finally, proof. They were real. But in this photo you can also see that they were not only limited to the snowy parts, look closely at the bottom right. You can see they extend in all directions:

Even more strangely, they even cut straight through the frozen lakes:

I cannot express how vast the reaches of these gridlines extended. In any given photo, you are looking at multiple kilometers in every direction. But they were going for hundreds, and hundreds of kilometers, crossing mountains, lakes, on either sides of train tracks and beyond.

I barely saw a single man-made structure the entire time. WTFFFFFFFF??

Finally, here's the Russian Whale in full =D