This Christmas, we pay a visit to Santa’s home, the North Pole, highlighting some of the most amazing natural phenomena there. Read on for an insight into the magic of the Arctic!
Aurora Borealis: Famously called the Northern lights, this is perhaps the most awesome arctic phenomena. The spectacular light displays occur when the sky is dark during solar storms. Although they sometimes seem to be touching the ground, the lights actually result from the interaction of the sun’s light with gases high in the atmosphere. The most common colour of an aurora is green, but blue, red and yellow auroras have also been sighted.
Halos: A Halo occurs when sunlight is refracted by ice crystals causing a perfect circle to be formed around the sun. It is different from a corona in that a corona is formed due to refraction by small water droplets in the atmosphere. Two special types of Halos are a ‘Sun Dog’, where circles appear on both sides of the sun, and a ‘Fog Bow’, which is like a normal rainbow except that it does not have any colours.
Coronas and Anticoronas: A corona appears as a ring(s) of light centered around the sun or moon. They are mostly observed when light from the sun or moon is deflected around cloud droplets. A similar phenomena, the Anticorona or glory, occurs when there are multiple light rings around a shadow created by an object on a cloud or a fog. It is often observed around airplanes.
Mirages and Optical Illusions: The Arctic witnesses a lot of optical illusions because of special atmospheric conditions. A superior mirage occurs when colder air near the ground causes images to appear distorted to a person standing on the ground. In the instance of a superior mirage, objects can appear to be elevated or stretched. For instance, a boat in water may appear to be floating in the sky. A Fata Morgana is a complex mirage which distorts objects to appear elongated and vertically distorted. For example, a flat shoreline may appear to have peaks and hills. These mirages have tricked many explorers into naming the peaks and mountains they saw, only to prove wrong by people who travelled to the Arctic in the future.
Water Sky and Ice Blink: Water sky is a phenomenon that occurs when the underside of a cloud layer over an open surface of water appears dark. An ice blink refers to white glare that appears on the underside of clouds. Both these phenomena help travellers gauge ice conditions at a distance, as they indicate the presence of light reflecting ice at a distance, when they are not easily visible.
Optical Haze: Similar to a fog or mist, this phenomenon occurs when convective wind currents are created in a layer of air next to the ground where warmer air flows up and colder air descends. The difference in how the warm and cold air refract light causes objects seen though the layer to blur. Optical haze occurs quite frequently in the Arctic, often making it difficult to identify details in the landscape.
White out: Occurring most frequently during spring and summer when the sun is near the horizon, a white out is a situation where the sky and snow assume a uniform shade of white. Objects lose contrast, and observers lose all sense of perspective. It becomes extremely dangerous to fly planes and undertake other operations.