Thisseems really weird to me. Is this real or even possible?
From the comments
So yes it’s entirely possible that this was the result of terrible reporting and fact checking.
Wow, really? I didn’t bother to read the comments because I figured . . . well, I guess I figured wrong.
Mirages DO happen, and are occasionallyspectacular, and I think that’s where the confusion in this article came in. Bad reporting though.
sheesh, that’s fog and/or pollution. Mirage my ass. To be fair, maybe you’ve never seen anything like this before and thus a little taken in.
Good ole Daily Mail.
Do you mean maybe I’ve never seen pollution before? What? I live on the US East Coast. I grew out outside Philadelphia, near the oil refineries on the Delaware River. I’ve seen pollution. But I never saw a city skyline reflected in that pollution.
But the article says the view in that direction is usually just open water. So, not low mist making the buildings across the way look like they are floating…the point was that there ARE no buildings across the way, right?
This is a relatively common phenomenon called a superior mirage.
Wouldn’t a superior mirage of a city skyline be an image of upside-down buildings? (Like in the diagram of the sailboat in your link.) kittenblue, the story is flat-out wrong, presumably due to translation issues. It’s just a somewhat cool sight that the real buildings appear to be floating in a cloud.
If it were a mirage, what would the reflection be of? And if the image is of buildings that don’t actually exist, it totally would be like a supernatural vortex and there would be crowds of people more or less freaking out, not like the “ooh, it’s like an enchanted fairyland” woman in the video.
What the article, frustratingly, never explains is… what city were they seeing?
Not always - it may be inverted or not, depending on many variables (relative temperatures, distance between observers, object and distorting atmosphere.)
The buildings would ordinarily be hidden by the horizon. It’s a startling effect, but it happens fairly frequently.
Fascinating. Good article here, although I’m not clear on the difference between a “generic” superior mirage and a Fata Morgana, or which of those the Chinese mirage is. The Daily Mail pictures and videos are 100 times clearer than any of the pics you linked, or the ones at Wikipedia, which is why it’s hard to believe the Chinese city is in fact a mirage.
Here’s the city in Google maps. The river isn’t that wide.
I think all that’s going on is that low-lying fog made it look like the city was floating on clouds. The whole mirage thing doesn’t make any sense.
But do we only know of these supposed translation issues because of the one comment? Or has anyone on the Dope read the original article in Chinese?
Yea, until I see footage of what it’s supposed to look like without the fog, it’s just fog floating over the river with buildings in the background.
Clearly a rip in the space-time continuum.