PORT ANGELES, Wash. — You OK up there in Canada?
A hot, summer day in the Pacific Northwest led to some unusual sights along the shores of Canada‘s Vancouver Island Tuesday, with distant skylines and shorelines appearing warped as if there was a glitch in the Matrix.
In this case, it was a mirage — specifically, a “Fata Morgana.”
Fata Morgana mirage in Victoria, B.C. on Aug. 26, 2025.
(Karen Sistek / FOX Weather)
The videos and photos above were taken from across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Port Angeles, Washington looking out toward Victoria, B.C.
“Looked like the city was floating,” photographer Karen Sistek said.
FATA MORGANA: A WEIRD MIRAGE THAT MAKES DISTANT OBJECTS APPEAR WARPED
The strange sights come from the cold 53-degree waters of the Strait, interacting with the unusually hot weather gripping the Pacific Northwest this week.
The air near the surface is cooled by water, then becomes trapped beneath a layer of significantly warmer air aloft of lighter density, known as a temperature inversion.
“So on a hot summer day next to the cold waters, you get a shallow layer of air near the water that is made much colder than the air above it, and thus, making it denser,” said Michael Kavulich with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
This causes light rays from distant objects to refract, or bend, downward toward an observer standing on the ground.
“As light moves from a region of less dense substance to more dense substance, no matter what the substance, it will bend away from a straight line path!” Kavulich said. “If you have a layer of significantly denser air near the surface, light will tend to bend downwards, meaning you see things as ‘higher up’ than they are in reality.”
This tricks our brains into seeing the objects as if their refracted light traveled in a straight line rather than bending as it passed through the layers of varying temperature within the inversion.
Distant landmarks or shorelines will appear warped or stretched, making them seem both taller and closer than they actually are because the observer is typically viewing several such mirages stacked on top of each other.
