An inferior mirage appears as a result of light bending towards warm air close to the ground, as the red line indicates.There may not even be a real object at all. Although this is possible, more often than not, the objects in a mirage may appear to look like something it is not.įor example, the "water" you see may be nothing more than the blue sky reflected on the ground, and the palm trees may be a completely different object that got distorted as the light traveled through layers of hot and cold air. To simplify and make the description of a mirage easy to understand, an identical inverted image of the palm trees and water was used in the illustration. It is at this location where you will perceive the phenomenon to be located, when the actual object may, in fact, be hundreds of miles away. The position where the light is not refracted anymore but reflects up towards the observer is called the point of total internal reflection. Since light always follows the quickest past, and warm air with less resistance is much faster to travel through, the light will bend towards the hot air close to the ground.Īs the red line in the illustration shows, light travels from objects higher up in the colder air to the warm air close to the ground before bending back towards the eyesight of the observer. It creates a substantial difference in air temperature between the warm air near the surface and the colder air above it.Ī medium with non-uniform properties has now been created with cold air, which is optically more dense, situated above warm air, which is optically less dense. On a hot day, the Sun rapidly warms up the Earth's surface, which in turn heats the air directly above the ground. The illustration below will clarify how and why light behaves in this fashion and how it contributes to the creation of a mirage:īy making use of the illustration above, it will be much easier to explain and understand how an inferior mirage gets formed. This is because light always follows the quickest path, not the shortest path. When traveling through a medium like the atmosphere, the difference in air density at different altitudes allows light to bend. In the vacuum of space, it does indeed travel in a straight line. It is widely assumed that light travels in a straight path, especially at a speed of 299 792 kilometers per second (186 282 miles per second). It can be seen on a hot day while traveling on a long stretch of road or in the desert, where the phenomenon first gained wide recognition.Ī mirage is capable of producing a misplaced image of an object due to the capability of light to refract (bend) in a medium with non-uniform uniform attributes. The most familiar and commonly occurring form of this optical distortion is the inferior mirage. Mirages can be divided into two types of optical distortions:īy looking at them individually, it will soon become clear how each phenomenon is formed and why we see (or perceive) the resulting image in the way we do. The word mirage was directly borrowed from the french verb, mirer, which originated from the Latin word, mirari, which translates to "mirror" or "to look at." As you will shortly learn, this is quite an accurate description of the phenomenon. She was actually viewing the Cheam mountain range on the mainland of British Columbia, nearly 200km (124 miles) away – and beyond the horizon from where Engels was standing.It is a simplified and concise summary of an event that needs a more detailed explanation to understand how it occurs and what mechanisms are at play during the process. The image soon went viral and Engels learned that the mysterious iceberg was really a mirage. The photograph initially stumped locals – including a friend who specializes in ice geomorphology. With no one else around to confirm the mysterious sighting, she snapped an image and for nearly half an hour, watched the hulking white shape on the horizon before it disappeared from sight.Įngels shared the image online, hoping to get an explanation. “It just looked so odd and I was nearly convinced that it really was an iceberg I was staring at.” “I was trying to pin this together in my head, and I really couldn’t come up with an explanation,” she said. Engels, who previously studied geography, cycled through possible explanations, including that a large piece of ice had improbably drifted down from Alaska, miraculously passing through narrow straits and dodging archipelagos.īut if an iceberg was in the area – especially one of that size – it would surely have made local news, she told herself.
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