An impossible dawn
In the winter of 1596, a Dutch expedition searching for the Northeast Passage became hopelessly trapped in sea ice. Led by navigator Willem Barentsz, the crew was forced to overwinter on the desolate Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. After the sun set for the last time on November 3, they endured the crushing cold and perpetual darkness of the polar night, not expecting to see a sunrise until early February.
On January 24, 1597, crewman Gerrit de Veer recorded a shocking event in his journal: he and two others saw the sun. His claim was met with disbelief. Barentsz and the other crew members were convinced it was impossible, even accusing de Veer of miscalculating the date. Yet, three days later on January 27, the sun appeared again, this time witnessed by the entire crew "in his full roundnesse". Their astronomical calculations were correct; the sun was not supposed to be there. At the time of the first sighting, the geometric position of the sun was nearly five degrees below the horizon. For centuries, de Veer's account was dismissed by many scientists, until the phenomenon was conclusively explained.
The polar light duct
The Novaya Zemlya effect is a powerful polar mirage and not a hallucination. It occurs under specific atmospheric conditions, primarily a strong and widespread temperature inversion over a flat, cold surface like sea ice. This inversion is a layer of frigid, dense air near the surface with a warmer air mass situated directly above it.
The sharp boundary between these two layers—the thermocline—is a powerful refracting lens. Instead of traveling in a straight line out into space, sunlight from far below the horizon enters the cold air layer and is bent, or ducted, along the Earth's curvature. This atmospheric duct can channel the light for hundreds of kilometers. An observer at the end of this light path sees an image of the sun, appearing as a flattened rectangle or a series of stacked lines, even though the sun remains hidden below the curve of the planet. While normal atmospheric refraction can lift the sun's apparent position by about half a degree, the Novaya Zemlya effect requires a much more intense bending of light to create a lift of up to five degrees.
Later polar explorers, including Fridtjof Nansen in 1894 and Ernest Shackleton in 1915, also documented similar "impossible" sunrises, confirming the reality of this bizarre optical event.