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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsMysterious floating city appears in sky above China
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/stories/mysterious-floating-city-appears-sky-above-chinaAn eerie ghost city recently appeared floating in the clouds above the Chinese cities of Jiangxi and Foshan, with thousands of eyewitness accounts, reports The Telegraph. The supernatural-seeming event was even caught on film. Bizarre images show a shadowy cityscape sitting atop clouds, skyscrapers literally poking the sky.
Of course, the event quickly became fodder for those with active imaginations. A city of the gods? A haunted city? (Just in time for Halloween.) A glitch in "The Matrix"? The spectral manifestation of a parallel universe?
According to scientists, none of the above. Although the images and eyewitness accounts are rather spooky and relatively lucid, the peculiar cloud city was most likely caused by a rare kind of light-bending mirage called Fata Morgana.
Aptly named after Morgan le Fay, a powerful enchantress from the tales of King Arthur, Fata Morgana mirages are caused by the refraction of light that happens when different layers of adjacent atmosphere experience different temperatures, and thus different densities. Basically, when light hits one of these atmospheric boundaries, it bends. Since our brains process light entering our eyes as if that light had traveled in a straight path, we end up seeing things in the sky that are not actually there. In this case, the image of the cityscape in the sky was probably just a reflection of actual cities on the ground.
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CaliforniaPeggy
(149,296 posts)Brother Buzz
(36,212 posts)An unusual optical phenomenon explains why the Titanic struck an iceberg and received no assistance from a nearby ship, according to new research by British historian Tim Maltin. Atmospheric conditions in the area that night were ripe for super refraction, Maltin found. This extraordinary bending of light causes miraging, which, he discovered, was recorded by several ships in the area. He says it also prevented the Titanics lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time and the freighter Californian from identifying the ocean liner and communicating with it. A 1992 British government investigation suggested that super refraction may have played a role in the disaster, but that possibility went unexplored until Maltin mined weather records, survivors testimony and long-forgotten ships logs. His findingspresented in his new book, A Very Deceiving Night, and the documentary film Titanics Final Mystery, premiering on the Smithsonian Channel at 8 p.m. on April 15are distilled here:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/did-the-titanic-sink-because-of-an-optical-illusion-102040309/?page=1
Avalux
(35,015 posts)She tells me that the 'city' could not be a reflection of buildings on the ground, since none of them resemble what was seen in the clouds. Also, it was viewed by people in different areas from different directions. Who know what caused the image, but I don't think the Fata Morgana explanation holds water.