As you know, a heat wave has been hitting Belgium since the start of the week. Due to the high temperatures, a rather spectacular phenomenon was captured on Tuesday in Oostduinkerke, a section of the municipality of Koksijde, in the north of the country.
While strolling along the coast, a Belgian was surprised by… “a mirage at sea”. Our colleagues from HLN wanted to find out more from an expert. Martijn Peters confirms: “It’s a mirage, more precisely an optical illusion that we call a mirage. This will warp objects like boats in various ways, often to the point that the object is completely unrecognizable.”
He details and states that “Normally the air at the surface is warmer than the air above it, but in a mirage we get a temperature inversion. Due to the water, the air above the sea is colder and above it there is a layer of air which is warmer due to the heating of the sun. This difference causes the light to bend. This light comes bent into our eyes, but our brain thinks all the light comes to us in a straight line. So we are, so to speak, deceived by our own brains.”
Results ? “Objects suddenly appear above the horizon and are sometimes distorted or reflected. And objects that are behind the horizon and normally invisible suddenly appear because of the curvature of light.” This is exactly what happened on Tuesday at the North Sea.