A man was walking this week along the UK coast when he was surprised to see what appeared to be a large ship floating in the sky in the distance. His remarkable photos actually show an optical illusion caused by a rare “superior mirage”.
Businessman David Morris, 52, was strolling along the coast in Gillan’s village in Cornwall on Thursday when he noticed the bizarre scene. He was able to pull out his smartphone and take a series of photos of the flying ship before the phenomenon passed.
“The images appear to show evidence of a phenomenon called fata morgana,” said a spokesman for the UK Met Office. “A rare and complex form of mirage in which horizontal and vertical distortion, inversion and elevation of objects occur in patterns of change.
“The phenomenon occurs over the water’s surface and is produced by the superposition of several layers of air of different refractive indexes.”
When you stick a straw in a glass of water, it can appear broken because the light in the straw is distorted by three different means (and refractive indexes) of air, glass and water. The same principle is happening in Morris’s photo with layers of air that bend light differently.
“Higher mirages occur because of the climatic condition known as temperature inversion, where cold air is close to the sea with the warmest air above it,” said BBC meteorologist David Braine BBC News. “As cold air is denser than hot air, it deflects light towards the eyes of those on the ground or on the coast, changing the appearance of a distant object.”
You don’t see this in Falmouth every day! 😲#mirage #falmouth#Cornwall pic.twitter.com/XvGr5s3rtz
– Spotlight (@BBCSpotlight) March 4, 2021
These types of mirages can make ships at a distance appear to be floating above where they really are, but they can also make ships below the horizon visible, when they normally would not be. Braine also notes that higher mirages are more common in the Arctic regions of the planet, but “very rarely” can be seen further south, as in the United Kingdom, in winter.
“I was amazed by the image in such a beautiful part of the country,” said Morris.
Image credits: Header image cropped from David Morris / Apex photo