David Morris / APEX
A man says he was ‘dumbfounded’ to look at the sea from a village in Cornwall, in the south west of England, and see a giant ship hanging in the air over the water. It was not his eyes that deceived him, but a rare weather phenomenon that caused the optical illusion.
The BBC’s meteorologist David Braine explained that what David Morris captured with his camera lens was not levitation, but a ‘superior aerial mirror’ caused by conditions more typical of the icy North Pole than before the English. coast.
David Morris / APEX
“Superior mirage occurs due to the weather condition known as a temperature inversion, where cold air lies near the ocean with warmer air above it,” Braine said. “Since cold air is denser than warm air, it bends light to the eyes of someone standing on the ground or on the shore, changing how a distant object appears.”
Previous observations of “ghost ships” around the world the illusion may have been involved, but the dazzling images captured by Morris seem to be some of the clearest examples of a superior mirage to date.
Braine said that although the phenomenon in this case caused the ship to float over the water, ‘sometimes an object can become visible below the horizon’, throwing objects that would otherwise be invisible into someone’s eyes, almost like a giant -mirror.