[Bobby Shafto]

I'd like to kick this off with a nice time lapse of a cold Montana vista. Whether the earth is flat or convex, this is real and shows how dynamic the atmosphere can be and how it can alter what we see.

Before we dive into potentially contentious discussion on the whys and what fors, let's just relax and enjoy the art of nature:

(Turn sound on if able. The audio score enhances the visuals. Music is "Morning Sun" by Draum)



And one of Pacific sunset with an elevated inversion, creating a superior mirage affecting the sun and one of the Farallon Islands, off the San Francisco coast. Music is instrumental version of "Sally" by Bertysolo.

[Bobby Shafto]

Okay, so here's another video that is probably more familiar within the Flat/Globe earth debate circles, thanks to FE advocates like Jeranism picking up on it to argue for an alternative explanation for why objects appear to disappear over a horizon.

It's a time lapse recording through one day in September 2012, looking northward across Skunk Bay (in Puget Sound) toward Whidbey Island from a spot above the shoreline in Hansville, WA  It's a zoomed and cropped video sourced from SkunkBayWeather.com's Cam 1, mounted about 70' above sea level. The point is Bush Point, 7 3/4 miles away. Bush Point has an elevation above sealevel of about 10' and the white structure on the tip is a 20' light house.
 
 I'm sure Greg Johnson who collected this video and posted in on YouTube never expected it to become grist for the Flat Earth mill.



Tom Bishop has cited it (as well as Jeranism's "Boats Over the Curve Debunked" video published a couple years ago) in this other discussion topic to argue how the so-called "Sinking Ship Effect" is manifest on a flat earth not by curvature but by changes in the intervening air mass. Jeranism, at least, states up front that it doesn't prove a flat earth, but only that it debunks curvature as the explanation for the visual phenomenon. I, of course, disagree (and not because I'm being intellectually dishonest as Jeranism sets it up if you dispute his explanation.)

Tom adopts this analysis of atmospheric refractive to contribute to the collection of flat earth alternative explanations for the visual phenomenon of how distant objects only appear to become obscured by a non-existence curvature obstruction.

I opted to try to split discussion of how atmospheric refraction affects our near-earth elevation horizontal view of distant objects to try to keep that thread on point. Though it forms the main point of Tom's defense of flat earth, diving into the particulars of what is correct or not correct about the principles of atmospheric refraction and its resulting optical phenomena, I felt, deserved it's own topic since it is so pervasive to both flat earth and globe earth arguments.

[Bobby Shafto]

I could find no stills from the Skunk Bay time lapse of objects being "cut off" by the refractive effects of the atmosphere. Squashed, stretched, distorted, raised, lowered, obscured by mirage...all yes. But no "sinking ship" effect.

Here is an array of pictures taken of the Finland's Isokari lighthouse from a distance of 9 miles at different times, in different conditions. (Pekka Parviainen)



This is what the "sinking ship cut off" would like:



Can refraction cause such an image?