SEEING 350 MILES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 194, 2 August 1940, Page 3

SEEING 350 MILES

808 BARTLETT'S ARCTIC MIRAGE An astonishing tale of an Arctic mirage was told at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society held in Philadelphia. The meeting was to celebrate a Polar anniversary. According to Bob Bartlett, master of the ship which took Admiral Peary on his voyage to the North Pole in 1909, mirages in the Arctic are as common as they are in the desert. Last summer, when he was in his famous ship Morissey halfway between Greenland and Iceland, his crew saw something which made them gasp with wonder. Looking towards Iceland they saw the snowcapped 7000-foot peak of Snaefellsjoekull nearly 350 miles away! This is said to be the longest recorded dis tance over wlricli the nakad eye has ever seen an object on the earth s surface from the ground level. This phenomenon has been described by a professor of the University of Michigan as a true mirage. Layers of hot air over layers of cold in the atmosphere distorted the light rays, he explained, so that instead of travelling in a straight line they travelled in a curve. Persons within the limited area at which the rays again came in contact with the earth's surface were able to see objects below the horizon, these objects appearing to be only a fraction of their actual distance.