Walking outside your front door and seeing a grey sky above can be pretty depressing. That being said, it's perhaps less worrisome than a thick blood-red sky. When the residents of the port city of Zhoushan, China, woke up to a blazing red sky, they feared the worst. From an out-of-control fire to an apocalypse, every single theory was thrown out there for consideration. Ultimately, the local Meteorologists got to work on investigating the matter and what they found was not at all expected...
In stark contrast to the more exciting explanations on offer, they discovered that the red sky had been formed due to the interaction between a low hanging cloud and a refracting light from the nearby harbor. "When weather conditions are good, more water in the atmosphere forms aerosols which refract and scatter the light of fishing boats and create the red sky seen by the public," the meteorological bureau explained to the Chinese Global Times. Although this helped to solve the case of the mysterious sky, the footage was too bizarre not to go viral.
#China red sky ..Global Times reports local meteorologist says 'rare red sky is caused by refraction of lights from fishing boats' pic.twitter.com/Ou06qvu9CO
— Anonymous Archangel Network Media (Rawle95) (@AnonymousNetwo6) May 8, 2022
Within minutes of the video being published, the internet did what it does best, spreading the story like wildfire. According to the Daily Mail, the videos and photos uploaded by the Chinese residents had been viewed by 150 million people in under 24 hours. People, of course, had a lot to say on the matter. "I have never seen anything like this before," one user commented. "It really amazes me that the sky can even turn red." "It is a blood-red color that doesn't look good at all," feared another. Some believed they knew better than the experts, offering their own theories. "There's gonna be an earthquake in seven days; it's not normal to see the sky turning all red," insisted one viewer.
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Interestingly, this is not an unprecedented event as historians believe this weather phenomenon also took place in 1770 in East Asia. Scientists attribute this ancient incident to abnormal amounts of aurora activity and insist that on this present occasion, there were no solar or geomagnetic outliers at work in the Zhoushan skies. It's all just because of a fishing boat...
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