Rare 'iceberg' mirage captured by Nanoose, B.C. woman

A Nanoose, B.C. woman who is considering a life of professional photography already has a head start on her plans after photographing a phenomenon rarely caught on camera – or even seen in person.

Simone Engels was out at Moorecroft Park in Nanoose on Jan. 9 trying to capture sunset images when her eye caught something unusual.

"It was blowing my mind," Engels says. "I did not know exactly what (I was) looking at, all these questions went through my mind right away."

Engels was seeing, and then photographed, what she first thought was an iceberg in the distance off the park. But even then, she knew that was highly unlikely.

"If it had floated by Campbell River someone would have called it in and that was the piece that didn’t quite make sense for it to be an iceberg," she says.

She captured images of what turned out to be a phenomenon she believes was a "superior mirage."

Alexandra Blair is the chair of the Mathematics and Sciences Department at North Island College and describes what occurred.

"We can describe our light as waves and we had a temperature inversion so the lower air was colder than the higher air, which doesn’t happen that often," she says.

"Because of the air being different temperatures and therefore different densities, it refracts the light and sort of bends down our light waves," Blair says.