It’s a striking spectacle that only happens when several conditions are met, and that’s the case right now.
Photos of Corsica seen from Nice are multiplying on social networks this week.
A TF1 team explains this phenomenon to you.
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The 1 p.m.
Every morning, Jean Mortini, an amateur photographer, gets up just before the sun and from his balcony, he scans the horizon hoping to see it appear. These Monday and Tuesday mornings, it was served. “I see Corsica therehe says, looking into his lens. It’s a fairly rare phenomenon, () we can’t see the beach, we can’t see the seaside, it’s impossible, we only see the tops of the mountains“, he specifies. A striking and ephemeral spectacle, a few tens of minutes at most, during which the island of beauty can be observed from the Côte d’Azur, while nearly 200 kilometers separate them.
Photos of the island as if placed on the horizon, and bathed in the pink-orange light of the morning, have multiplied on social networks since Monday morning, and some Nice residents still struggle to believe their eyes. “I didn’t realize it right away, I looked and then after a little while, I said to myself, but it’s Corsica that I see from afar!“., confides a passerby in the TF1 news report to be found at the top of this article. “It’s like a mirage, but frankly, it’s magnificent, you have to see it one day“, says another, when a third marvels: “In five minutes, you’d think you could touch the mountains“.
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This phenomenon occurs especially in winter, when the air is cold and dry and the sky is clear, especially after an episode of strong wind. “These conditions cause the propagation of light rays to be very strongly curved, which makes it possible to see below the horizon lineexplains Marie-France Delansorne, head of the Météo France center in Nice, to our camera. And there, from the coast, we can see in the southeast direction the Monte Cinto massif“.
It is therefore more a projection of the island than Corsica itself which appears to us. An optical effect, a little winter miracle that can even take place in broad daylight in exceptionally clear weather.
