White line or no white line, what is happening here? How is atmospheric refraction causing this phenomenon?
Air refracts light in a lot of different ways. For this optical compression rationale of yours to be accountable for a "sinking ship" effect, there has to be a mechanism. You can't just call it "refraction" and walk away.
Good illustration. I think that this diagram pretty much shows the light rays of the inferior mirage effect.
From the Skunkbay timelapse we see that the refraction changes throughout the day. In the inferior mirage, the upwards and downwards curving rays are also variable. The upward curving light at times overwhelms the downward curving light, compressing it downwards, creating the sinking effect with the light line at the bottom.
What causes it: The Sinking Ship Effect is little more than the inferior mirage we all already know about.
Just to put a fine point on it, if I understand you correctly, you're saying the Sinking Ship Effect is the direct result of an inferior mirage whereby the object is mirrored beneath and then squashed down into a into a thin white line.
Are you abandoning SR’s “Laws of Perspective” Sinking Ship Effect explanation in ENAG?
Samuel Birley Rowbotham didn't have access to time-lapse photography. Rowbotham does describe the scene changing over time, however -- the sinking effect sometimes occurring and sometimes not for lighhouses and parked ships. I think that the timelapse videos of the sinking effect occurring for long periods of time is in agreement with Rowbotham's observations and, to me at least, pushes the refraction explanation beyond conjecture.
I suppose that it is still possible that waves and swells are somehow affecting the scene. The timelapse video strongly implies that it is all part of the same fluid refractive phenomena, however.
I do believe that Rowbotham's first explanation for the Sinking Ship Effect, as
sometimes caused by lack of optical resolution, is true, however, according to some of my own trials of putting a printout illustration of a white sailboat against a black background with a hull height of 1/8th of an inch at a distance of 40 feet. The hull does indeed seem to disappear.