China witness a mirage of a floating city in the sky

As you can see in this news video, this particular mirage is absolutely massive and really does look like a giant city that’s floating in the clouds.

But how is this possible? This page from San Diego State University offers a nice introduction to mirages and explains how giant mirages such as this one are formed.

“[Mirages] are real phenomena of atmospheric optics, caused by strong ray-bending in layers with steep thermal gradients,” the page explains. “Because mirages are real physical phenomena, they can be photographed.”

Essentially these mirages occur whenever the sun heats up a layer of the atmosphere even as the layer below it remains at a cooler temperature. This causes light travelling through the atmosphere to get refracted and creates the illusion of objects in the sky like the giant city we see in the video.