What is Fata Morgana atmospheric phenomenon. Fata Morgana phenomenon. What about the islands

A bizarre and changeable combination of differently located near the horizon reflected images of parts of the sky or ground objects. Occurs when there are a large number of layers of air of different density in the atmosphere.

Definition of fata morgana, Encyclopedic Dictionary.

The ancient Egyptians had a legend of amazing beauty, according to which every mirage is the ghost of a country that has gone into oblivion. It turns out that wherever a “transparent” settlement was observed, there was once a city. Such places have a special aura, so to speak. They have a soul. But alas, in the modern world it is not customary to believe in legends, and every day there are less and less natural mysteries, which are the main soil for them.

If we translate the definition from the Encyclopedic Dictionary from bird to human, it turns out that a mirage is a special optical phenomenon. The air in the atmosphere can be of different density, and when a large number of such “different” layers accumulate, the sun's rays, refracting, create an image of an object that can be hundreds of kilometers away from the appearance of a mirage. Just because of refraction, the rays seem to look beyond the horizon - and it turns out fata morgana.

Most often, a mirage occurs due to uneven heating of air at different heights. Let's say that at the top there is a layer that is well warmed up somewhere in hot countries, which was brought here by a crazy wind, and below it is a cold anticyclone. In this case, the refraction of the rays is not only inevitable: the light can "peek" far enough beyond the horizon line to form a "ghost".

And in the desert itself, mirages play cruel jokes with travelers. Not only the air is heated there, but also the soil, so a slightly different metamorphosis occurs with the rays. They no longer strive for the horizon, and will be reflected both from the encountered object and from the earth. Such a beam, falling into the eyes of a traveler, will not betray its “irregularity” in any way, and will project an image of the object from which it repelled, but as if it were a reflection in water, which also “spills” around immeasurably. This is the first class of atmospheric mirages (and there are three in total), it is called lake, or lower. The scientist Gaspard Monge, during his stay in Egypt, encountered this phenomenon, and left such a memory of him:

When the surface of the earth is very heated by the Sun, and is only just beginning to cool before dusk, the familiar country no longer extends to the horizon, as during the day, but passes, as it seems, about one league into a continuous flood.

The villages farther away look like islands in a dead lake. Beneath each village is its overturned image, only it is not sharp, small details are not visible, like a reflection in the water, swayed by the wind. If you approach a village that seems to be surrounded by a flood, the bank of imaginary water is moving away, the water branch that separated us from the village gradually narrows until it disappears completely, and the lake now begins behind this village, reflecting the villages located further.

There is another class called the top class. In this case, the rays display an image of an object located nearby. But the third class, which includes ultra-long-range vision mirages, is able to surprise eyewitnesses with a unique spectacle showing objects located several thousand kilometers from the scene of events. Here is how forced viewers describe it:

On the night of March 27, 1898, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the crew of the Bremen ship Matador was frightened by a vision. Around midnight, the crew spotted a ship about two miles away that was battling a violent storm. This was all the more surprising because the surroundings were calm. The ship crossed the course of the “Matador”, and there were moments when it seemed that a collision of ships was inevitable ... The crew of the “Matador” saw how, during one strong blow of a wave against an unknown ship, the light went out in the captain’s cabin, which was visible all the time in two windows. After some time, the ship disappeared, taking with it the wind and waves.

The matter was clarified later. It turned out that all this was happening with another ship, which at the time of the "vision" was from the "Matador" at a distance of 1700 km.

For this category of mirages, scientists have not yet found a reliable explanation. If everything is clear with the first two, then here is the snag. There are many hypotheses, among them - the formation of multilayer mirages of the second class, which are superimposed on one another and thereby create an image along a certain chain.

And there is such a category of mirages, which cannot be called otherwise than ghostly. They are called voluminous, and they occur most often in mountainous areas, high above sea level. In rarefied air, the rays are not just reflected from the object towards the rocks, they are also bent so that they return to the person again, and he sees his own distorted reflection. A sort of boomerang effect. Most often, such a mirage corresponds to the size of the object. from which it was reflected, but not always obtained in one quantity - there can be two or three “boomerangs”. Some researchers put forward an insane hypothesis, according to which the ghosts complained about by visitors to ancient castles are nothing more than a three-dimensional mirage.

In the book Mirages of the Arctic, dated 1940, the testimony of a polar explorer from Sweden, Nordenskiöld, is given:

One day, a bear, whose approach was expected and which everyone saw well, instead of approaching with its usual soft gait, zigzags and sniffing the air, wondering if foreigners were good for him to eat, just at the moment of the sniper’s sight ... spread out gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small green gull.

Another time, during the same sleigh trip, the hunters, being in a tent spread out for rest, heard the cry of a cook fussing around her: “Bear, big bear! No, a deer, a very small deer!” At the same moment, a shot rang out from the tent, and the killed “bear-deer” turned out to be a small arctic fox, which paid with its life for the honor of portraying a large animal for several moments.

It is noteworthy that these cases are described by a person who is quite trustworthy. What is the probability that a mirage of a larger animal will appear in the place of a tiny arctic animal, which at that moment is in the middle of nowhere? And such phantoms arose not only in the place of animals, but also in the place of man. Involuntarily, legends about werewolves are recalled - maybe it was mirages that “worked” for the benefit of their popularity? Here already the curvature of the rays is unlikely to be explained. Although I am not a physicist, it is not for me to judge.

There is the principle of “Occam's razor”: if what is happening can be explained from a rational point of view, then there is no need to invent any extraneous (and otherworldly) influences on the situation. Were-mirages have been given the simplest explanation: they are just Fata Morgana. A complex composite phenomenon moves along with air masses, and, accordingly, fluctuates, losing its original features and acquiring others. True, this “fata morgana” is sometimes so long that suspicions about its illusory nature involuntarily arise. Fans of science fiction offer their version: they say, this is not a mirage at all, but a window into another world that exists side by side with ours. Just under the influence of some factors, the window opens for a short time, and those living on our planet can look a little into the neighboring reality. The members of the “Flying Wing” club are especially addicted to this hypothesis: they interview residents of different settlements with enviable regularity, study local folklore in order to find out the places where such “windows” most often appear. It remains to be hoped that this group of science fiction writers will one day not only generate hypotheses, but also begin to somehow prove them.

Far vision phantoms stand apart.

This happened in the 20s of our century. A large ocean steamer was on its next voyage from Europe to America. And suddenly, not far from the Azores, everyone who was on deck clearly saw the “Flying Dutchman”. The thought of a terrible ghost ship flashed through the minds of many passengers and sailors. And the unseen ship threatened to crash into the ship. The captain at the very last moment in a loud, breaking voice ordered the ship to change course. Listing to starboard, the sailboat swept past.

And at that moment, the frightened, amazed passengers saw something even more amazing: people in ancient costumes were rushing around the deck of the sailboat. They raised their hands, silently shouted something, as if trying to warn mortals about something ...

It is clear that the passengers spent the rest of the voyage in fear of imminent death. After all, according to legend, a meeting with a ghost ship does not bode well.

When the steamer arrived at the port, the story of the Flying Dutchman was widely publicized. Articles about ghosts appeared in many English newspapers ... Only later it turned out that the ocean liner met with a sailboat intended for filming the film. He was supposed to portray ... "Flying Dutchman." But as soon as he went to sea, a storm broke out. The game has become a reality. The sailboat was carried away and ruffled the waves for several days. Oncoming ships shied away, no one dared to help those in distress ...

The legend about this ghostly ship in all respects meets the conditions for the formation of a distant vision phantom. Who knows, maybe some of the meetings with the “Flying Dutchman” are nothing more than testimonies of people who watched the phantom?

As for the mirages themselves, it seems to me that they still have a handful of mysteries in store for scientists, and not all of their secrets have been revealed. To look from the outside - everything (well, almost everything) is quite simply explained, physics is the queen of science, and those who believe in miracles are dreamers. But to argue in a similar vein will only work from the outside. Having become an eyewitness to a mirage, you completely forget about the laws of physics according to which it is formed, and you remember anything - about the sorceress Fatya Morgana, about other worlds, but not about a rational point of view.

Everything and nothing is known about mirages. On the one hand, it is difficult to find a person who at least once in his life would not see the simplest mirage - a blue lake on a hot highway. Opticians intelligibly, with a drawing and formulas, will talk about this phenomenon. On the other hand, thousands of people observed literally hanging cities, quaint castles and even entire armies in the sky, but here experts have no explanation for this natural phenomenon. It is almost impossible to study mirages, because they do not appear by order. Their mistress, Fata Morgana, is always original and unpredictable.

People have seen mirages since ancient times, about which many legends have been preserved. Particularly colorful stories about the mirages of Palestine were left by the crusaders, whom, however, no one particularly believed. The knights were too fond of lying about the wonders of the East. The beginning of scientific observation of this optical focus coincided with the appearance of the ship's log, in which everything unusual was recorded in detail. Let's open the old book "Daily notes about sailing to the northern whale fishery, containing research and acquisitions on the eastern coast of Greenland." It speaks of a large city, which was observed in the summer of 1820 by the commander of the ship "Baffin", full of castles and temples, very similar to ancient buildings. The sailor sketched this wonderful phenomenon in detail, but the evidence later, of course, was not confirmed.

Later, in 1840, the inhabitants of a small island north of England saw beautiful white buildings in the sky. Since there was nothing like this in their homeland, people considered this to be a confirmation of the fairy tale about the Fin people who lived in the crystal city. The vision of a distant country was repeated after 17 years and hung in the air for three whole hours.

But the distant cold Alaska has long been recognized as the champion of mirages. The stronger the cold, the clearer and more beautiful visions appear in her sky. The appearance of mirages in those parts began to be constantly recorded only in the 19th century. So, in 1889, a local resident, walking near Mount Fairweather, in the southeast of the peninsula, observed the silhouette of a big city - with skyscrapers, high towers and spiers, temples that looked like mosques. The source of the mirage could be located thousands of kilometers from Alaska.

By the way, Alaska to this day remains one of the best places in the world for the appearance of mirages. A special society for the study of natural optical phenomena has even been created there, which publishes a magazine for observing mirages, and tourists from Canada and the United States are taken by bus to admire how mountains rise right out of the abyss on a flat ocean horizon, and then no one knows where they disappear.

But in order to see a real mirage, it is not at all necessary to go to Alaska. If on a hot summer day you stand on the highway against the sun, you can see how the roadway 2-3 kilometers from us seems to plunge into a lake shining in the sun. Let's try to get closer to the "lake" - it will move away, and no matter how much we walk towards it, it will always be in the distance. It was these mirages in ancient times that drove travelers to despair, languishing from heat and thirst. In the literature, this type of mirage is called oasis, or lake, and physicists who are not prone to lyrics call it lower, and now we will understand why.

The nature of the lake mirage has been studied in detail. The sun's rays heat up the soil, from which the lower layer of air heats up. He, in turn, rushes up, immediately being replaced by a new one, which heats up and flows upwards. Light rays always bend from warm layers towards colder ones. In physics, this phenomenon is called refraction and has been known since the time of Ptolemy. The rays from the bright sky near the horizon, heading towards the earth, bend upward above it and reach our eyes from below along an oblique path, as if reflected from something above the earth itself. We see, of course, a piece of blue sky, only below the place where it actually is. And the effect of shine and overflow is caused by the heterogeneity of the flows of warm air rising from the hot surface.

The same mirages - castles, cities and mountains - with which we began our story, although more diverse than lake ones, are generally similar to them in explanation. Scientists call them superior mirages. A typical example is given in Aristotle's Meteorology, how the inhabitants of Syracuse sometimes saw the coast of continental Italy for several hours, although it was 150 km away. Similar phenomena are also caused by the redistribution of warm and cold layers of air. A decrease in its density with height "forces" the rays reflected from objects that are not high above the horizon to bend downward. And the laws of optics are such that we always see the object in the direction of the last segment of the path of the light beam. Therefore, atmospheric refraction lifts objects, which allows you to look beyond the horizon. If there is a lower and upper mirage, why not be a side one? Amazing phenomena can often be observed near the well-heated walls of buildings. “Approaching the wall of the fort, made of sandstone, I suddenly noticed that it shone like a mirror and dusty palm trees and camels dragging our cannons on their humps were reflected in it,” French officer Lazar Pogu describes his impressions of Tunisia. And the Dutch astronomer and popularizer of science, Marcel Minnart, suggested this optical trick: “Stand at arm's length against a long wall and look at a shiny metal object that your friend gradually brings closer to the wall at the other end. When an object is a few centimeters away from the wall, its contours will be distorted, and you will see its reflection on the wall, as if it were a mirror. On a very hot day, there may even be two images.” The nature of this mirage is exactly the same as that of the lake. Of course, the rays of light are not reflected from the wall, but from the hotter layer of air adjacent to it.

For the next, most mysterious type of mirage, called Fata Morgan, no convincing recognized explanation has yet been found. They got their name in honor of the heroine of the Breton epic Fata Morgana, translated from Italian as “fairy Morgana”. They say that she, the half-sister of King Arthur, the rejected beloved of Lancelot, settled out of chagrin at the bottom of the sea, in the crystal palace, and since then she has been deceiving sailors with ghostly visions. Here is an example of a documented fata morgana, that is, recorded by eyewitnesses, whom we have no reason not to believe. On April 3, 1900, the Boers - the defenders of Bloemfontein - saw the battle formations of the British army in the sky, moreover, so clearly that one could distinguish the buttons on the red uniforms of the officers. This was taken as a bad omen. Two days later, the capital of the Orange Republic surrendered.

Undoubtedly, numerous “Flying Dutchmen”, which sailors still see, can be attributed to the Fata Morgans. At 11 am on December 10, 1941, the team of the British transport "Vendor", located in the Maldives, noticed a burning ship on the horizon. "Vendor" went to the rescue of those in distress, but an hour later the burning ship fell on its side and sank. "Vendor" approached the alleged place of the death of the ship, but, despite a thorough search, not only did not find any debris, but even stains of fuel oil. At the port of destination, in India, the commander of the "Vendor" learned that at the very moment when his team was watching the tragedy, the cruiser "Repulse" was sinking, attacked by Japanese torpedo bombers near Ceylon. The distance between the ships at that time was 900 km.

How do scientists try to explain such phenomena?

If, for example, one follows the Fraser-Mach theory, then for the appearance of a fata morgan, it is necessary that the dependence of air temperature on altitude be non-linear. At first, the temperature increases with height, but from a certain level, the rate of its increase decreases. A similar temperature profile, only with a steeper "break", scientists call an air lens. The existence of such an effect is substantiated by meteorologists, but it is too early to say that it is the cause of the fatamorgan.

It is authentically known about mirages-ghosts. Here is how the British meteorologist Caroline Botley describes this effect. “On a hot August day in 1962, I was picking flowers. Suddenly, a few meters away, I saw a figure, it was trembling and swaying, it was quite massive. I dropped the bouquet of flowers in horror and only then noticed that the ghost also had a bouquet of flowers and he also dropped it. It was my own reflection. I distinguished all shades, details, body color in such detail, as if I saw myself in a mirror. Despite the fact that Miss Botley is known throughout America as an expert on the weather, one would think that this time it was definitely a hallucination. But in 1965, an American tourist photographed a similar ghost. Since then, a dozen photos of ghost mirages have appeared and even one amateur video. Such phenomena usually occur in the morning, on a hot day, when steam is still rising from the earth. Scientists believe that ghosts are not caused by the refraction of light, but by reflection on a rare fog. But scientists cannot yet speak confidently about the "mechanisms" that create mirages-ghosts. There are more guesses than substantiated theories.

Alexey Savin, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Many have heard this phrase. What is fata morgana, what phenomenon in nature does it mean? What legends are associated with the origin of this designation? What reliable examples exist about the Fata Morgana, what, in fact, did those who described it see? And why can these phenomena be photographed, unlike optical illusions? All this will be discussed in this article.

Explanatory dictionary - what is fata morgana

All dictionaries interpret this stable phrase as complex mirages that overlap one another and are constantly changing. This is a foreign word that has become part of our language. The meaning of the word fata morgana (emphasis on the first syllable) as complex mirages came from sailors who saw strange phenomena in the oceans. In Italian, fata morgana means "mirage". It is formed from the words fata, which means "fairy", and morgana, and this is its own name.

Fairy Morgana or King Arthur's sister?

In the Breton chronicles, there is a water nymph, the fairy Morgana, who lives at the bottom of the sea and deceives sailors with ghostly images, confusing them and leading them to death. Tired travelers turned to the ghostly creations of Morgana and disappeared without a trace.

According to another legend, Morgan le Fay was the half-sister of the great King of England Arthur, his worst rival and beloved Lancelot. She was a sorceress, knew black magic and the art of healing. The image of this sorceress passed from the Celts to the Britons, and, in the end, in the Middle Ages, it took shape in Fata Morgana - the mistress of the mythical "islands of apples", who built ghostly castles of unprecedented beauty. It was them that the sailors called the Fata Morgana (castles of Morgana).

Ancient myths and eyewitness accounts

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since the time of King Arthur, but Fata Morgana continues to play tricks on travelers. Here are just a few documentary evidence of the appearance of ghostly and complex phenomena of Fata Morgana.

In the annals of Britain in 1684 in the Irish Sea from the shore they saw an unknown island with a large city on it. The island soon disappeared and then reappeared in 1908.

And how many islands were even plotted on ancient maps, which were not found later. An example is the Aurora Islands in the Atlantic, which were seen in 1762 by the sailors of the Aurora whaler. But the inhabitants of the French Cote d'Azur have repeatedly observed a mountainous island in the Mediterranean Sea, which before their eyes was dissolved in the air.

But there is also evidence of overland appearances of Fata Morgana: over Silesia (Poland) in 1785, unknown troops passed in a military parade. In Vienna, the same parade was seen in 1848.

But especially frequent evidence of ghost ships in the sky appeared at the end of the 19th century. The American writer Charles Fort, with a claim to science, wrote the book "New Lands", describing such Fata Morgana that, in his opinion, they were ships of alien travelers.

In our modern age, these phenomena are filmed with photo and video equipment. At sea, on paved highways, in deserts and at the poles. And although these mirages have retained the name Fata Morgana, optical physics has long explained what these phenomena are.

Scientific rationale

The atmosphere of our planet is heterogeneous and consists of layers with different temperatures. Sunlight passes through these layers of air with different refractions. And the greater the temperature difference between the layers, the path of the sun's rays is more distorted there. Optical physics compares the layers of the atmosphere with lenses that have a different refractive index of the light flux. The lowest layer on hot days heats up from the surface of the planet and partially the sun's rays do not pass through it, but are reflected. This is how the Fata Morgana puddles on the hot road appear, which are just a reflection of the sky.

But what about the islands?

The same layers of the atmosphere create islands in the seas and oceans. Only in this case, additional conditions are necessary - in addition to temperature, air density decreases with height. Rays of light fall on an island lying far beyond the visible horizon, are reflected from them and return to the upper layers. There they change direction and return down again, being reflected once again from the surface layer, but in a completely different place. Here you have the Fata Morgana, the meaning of which was previously attributed to the worst omens.

simple experience

Can't believe it? Try to put the simplest experience. To do this, you will need: a mirror, children's cubes and an observer. We build a castle from cubes on one side of the table. The observer sits on a chair on the other side, but so that the castle does not fall into his field of vision. We take a mirror and hold it over the lock, slightly turning it towards the observer. In this experiment, the mirror is an analogue of the atmosphere reflecting lens, and the castle in the reflection is a mirage.

Such different mirages

Mirages in science are called optical illusions. Puddles on the pavement, islands and ships in the sea are simple mirages. But the meaning of Fata Morgana is attributed to complex optical phenomena in the atmosphere, when reflected objects are seen repeatedly and distorted. And the more complex the shape of the layers of the atmosphere, the more bizarre the phenomenon. Layers move and flip, multiply, superimpose images of objects on top of each other. And now ships and cities soar in the heavenly heights. That is why these phenomena can be photographed - after all, these are optical images, and not illusions in the observer's head.

"Flying Dutchman"

The ghost ship that sailors saw, about which legends are composed and which is sung in many works of art - today may or may not be a Fata Morgana phenomenon. According to legend, in the 15th century, a Dutch ship under the command of Captain Philip van der Decken got into a storm off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope. The captain refused to wait out the storm and swore that not a single person would leave the ship until they had circled the cape, even if it took forever. A voice from heaven commanded this to be. Since then, the damned ship has plied the ocean, bringing trouble to anyone who sees it. This is one version of the legend, there are others. As well as possible explanations, there are many. As an example of a mirage at sea, let's take a picture (see below), where you can see in dynamics how the image of two ships changes.

A muse for writers and a destiny for dreamers

Fata Morgana has been a source of inspiration for many writers and non-fiction writers. Hans Christian Andersen described this phenomenon in the fairy tale "Wild Swans", Anton Chekhov in the story "The Monk", Ernst Shackleton in the novel "The South". But for dreamers and those who blame them for excessive imagination, the meaning of Fata Morgana is unrealizable and not real illusions. They seem real, but melt in the haze of time.

Fata Morgana is one of the most mysterious types of mirages.
These phenomena got their name in honor of the heroine of the British epic Fata Morgana, the half-sister of King Arthur, translated from Italian as “fairy Morgana”.

Fata Morgana is an optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, consisting of several forms of mirages, when complex and rapidly changing images of objects far beyond the horizon appear in the sky.

Fata Morgana, no doubt, can also be attributed to the effect of the "flying Dutchman", which sailors see today. At 11 am on December 10, 1941, the crew of the British transport ship Vendor, located in the Maldives, noticed a burning ship on the horizon.

"Vendor" went to the rescue of those in distress, but an hour later the burning ship fell on its side and sank. "Vendor" approached the alleged place of the death of the ship, but, despite a thorough search, not only did not find any debris, but even stains of fuel oil.

At the port of destination, in India, the commander of the "Vendor" learned that at the very moment when his team was watching the tragedy, the cruiser "Repulse" was sinking, attacked by Japanese torpedo bombers near Ceylon. The distance between the ships at that time was 900 km.

Fata Morgana occurs when, in the lower layers of the atmosphere, several alternating layers of air of different density are formed (usually due to temperature differences), capable of giving mirror reflections. As a result of reflection, as well as refraction of rays, real-life objects give several distorted images on the horizon or above it, partially overlapping each other and rapidly changing in time, which creates a bizarre picture of a fata morgana.