The residents of Blackall could be forgiven for thinking they'd somehow been transported to the Middle Eastern desert city of Dubai last Friday, when skyscrapers loomed on their western horizon.
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Local chemist Ian Kinsey, out and about in the early morning, captured the 'instant city' that had grown out of the sky in the cool air, saying it looked like Blackall had become a suburb of Brisbane, 1000 km to the east.
Social media was quick to tell him he was witnessing a Fata Morgana, an Italian term for a complex form of mirage most commonly seen in polar regions, but also thought to be responsible for the appearance of Min Min lights.
According to UQ professor Guy Wallis, the strange striated form is typical of the phenomena, which just needs the right conditions - cold air sitting low along the ground and warmer air above it - to work its magic.
"This is similar to a traditional (inverted) mirage but the light bends the other way, allowing you to see tall objects that are actually far beyond the horizon," he said. "In a traditional mirage the temperature gradient is the other way around - so we see the sky projected onto the ground, giving the appearance of water."
According to Wikipedia, thermal inversion alone is not enough to produce this kind of mirage - the layer of significantly warmer air resting over colder dense air forms an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens, resulting in a series of both inverted and erect images.
The weather phenomenon is named after King Arthur's sorceress half-sister, Morgan Le Fay, who spirited him off to Avalon after his last battle.
In medieval times, suggestions for the location of Avalon included the 'other side of the Earth', ie Sicily and other locations in the Mediterranean.
Morgan is associated with Sicily's Mount Etna, the supposedly hollow mountain locally identified as Avalon since the 12th century.
The Fata Morgana mirage is also thought to be responsible for the Flying Dutchman folklore of a ghost ship that can never go home.
Now in Queensland it's given rise to a whole new city in the state's central west.
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