Baffin Island: Floe Edge – Fogbow

A fog blew one evening from the ocean and with the sun low in the west a rare atmospheric phenomenon of fogbow appeared over the water. Wow! I never even knew something like this existed and here it was within feet of the edge of the ice. Foxbow is similar to rainbow, except the sun is shinning into the fog instead of rain. Since the water droplets are infinitely minute when compared to raindrops, the fogbow doesn’t have any color like rainbow, because the colors get diffracted due to small wavelengths of associated light. Whatever the science is behind this – the fogbow is a white rainbow! And this one hung out for almost an hour as the fog was moving in onshore and the sun was shining on it. The sun doesn’t go below horizon here at all.