coolthingoftheday:The Novaya Zemlya Effect is an optical phenomenon named after the archipelago loca
coolthingoftheday:The Novaya Zemlya Effect is an optical phenomenon named after the archipelago located just north of Russia, in the Arctic Ocean where it was first observed. It was first described by the crew of a Dutch ship in 1597 during an expedition into the Arctic Ocean to try to find a passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Unfortunately, their ship got caught in the sea ice, forcing the crew to overwinter on the island. The sun went down on November 3rd, and they didn’t expect to see it again until February 8th of the following year. However, to their great surprise, they awoke on the morning of January 24th to see this - a glimpse of the sun two full weeks before predicted. Three days later, it happened again; and the crew was so confused by its appearance that they decided to write a report about it and submit it to the scientific community for review. News of the Novaya Zemlya Effect spread throughout the scientific community, and it was met with disbelief and skepticism almost everywhere that it was heard. Most scientists dismissed the observation, attributing it to an error in date-keeping, and the incident was largely forgotten. Only Kepler accepted the possibility of such sightings, and even made a surprisingly good attempt at scientific explanation.Nearly three hundred years later, in 1894, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen made another observation of the fabled Novaya Zemlya Effect during his North Pole expedition. He described this in his book ‘Farthest North’. Again, in 1918, the phenomenon was observed by Ernest Shackleton during an expedition to Antarctica. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the Novaya Zemlya Effect was proven to be a genuine natural phenomenon.So, what exactly is the Novaya Zemlya Effect? According to Wikipedia, “The Novaya Zemlya effect will give the impression that the sun is rising earlier than it actually should (astronomically speaking), and depending on the meteorological situation, the effect will present the sun as a line or a square (which is sometimes referred to as the “rectangular sun”), made up of flattened hourglass shapes. This occurs when the conditions that require a mirage to occur are inverted. A mirage occurs when air near the ground gets heated; conversely, the Novaya Zemlya Effect occurs when air above the ice surface gets cooled so that a strong temperature inversion layer is formed. Rays of sunlight enters the colder layer and gets channeled around the curvature of the Earth. The effect can only be observed near the poles where conditions are frigid.”(Source) -- source link