It’s a bit misty in London at the moment.
Flew into foggy London. Views are beautiful – this is the Shard and all the towers in the city pic.twitter.com/3j6AeF3Btt
— Sarah Wells (@sarahjwells) November 1, 2015
This, despite what Hollywood may have told us, is pretty unusual: while the skies over the British capital are grey with depressing frequency, the clouds very rarely descend to ground level. (By the same token, it rains less here than in Rome, the temperate hardly ever drops below freezing, and we haven’t had a proper white Christmas since 1895.)
But it does happen occasionally. The last really serious fog was in December 2013, when visibility got so poor that St. Paul’s Cathedral was almost invisible from a few hundred metres away across the Millennium Bridge.
Image: Daniel Sorabji/Getty.
The fog didn’t go very high though: a few storeys up, it was actually quite sunny.
Image: Daniel Sorabji/Getty.
The water vapour that fog is composed of often comes from ground level, so it’s not unusual for the fog layer to stay relatively low. As it did in Sydney Harbour in June 2008:
Image: Torsten Blackwood/Getty.
Sometimes it gets a little higher. As you can see in this picture of Dubai last month:
Image: Rene Slama/Getty.
From the ground, though, it can look pretty intense. In May 2014, the tops of the skyscrapers of New York’s Financial District were practically invisible:
Image: Andrew Burton/Getty.
There were terrible views from the Eiffel Tower that day in December 2012:
Image: Lionel Bonaventure/Getty.
But not as terrible as the views of Chicago from pretty much anywhere, this day in August 2002:
Image: David Sky/Wikimedia Commons.
Anything could lie on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Image: Runner310/Flickr.
Thsi picture, from June 2015, shows just another beautiful day in Brisbane.
Image: Bradley Kanaris/Getty.
In Cairo in December 2010, a rain storm combined with a sand storm to make, well, a mess:
Image: Khaled Desouki/Getty.
Not all fog is a natural phenomenon, however. This thirlling view of Beijing from November 2010 was caused by air pollution.
Image: Frederic Brown/Getty.
Incidentally, it was this kind of smog that gave London its foggy reputation in the first place.
