Fog Monet - the fog of an environmental disaster

Among the paintings of the London period of the famous French Impressionist Claude Monet, one of the series of paintings "The Parliament Building" written at the beginning of the last century is striking and particularly surprising. It depicts a red mist through which the Sun shines weakly, and the houses in the distance seem to be ghosts. Could this really be? And if so, what determines the color of the fog?

Could this really be? And if so, what determines the color of the fog?

First, let us recall the school course of physics, from which it is known that fog is the accumulation of small droplets of water (or small ice crystals) that arise under certain conditions in the immediate vicinity of the surface of the earth or the water surface. The fog extends a layer from tens of centimeters to tens and even hundreds of meters above the ground. In the event of fog, horizontal visibility deteriorates, which is especially often heard in weather forecasts, warning representatives of various modes of transport about special caution when driving.

The fog has a bluish-white color, but the strong one can be milky white. True, such a color is characteristic only of observations near clean places - meadows, forests, lakes. In cities, fogs are dirty gray due to the large amount of dust in the air. The color of the fog is determined by light rays, which are scattered on particles of water or ice. These particles are much larger than a micron and scatter light of different wavelengths equally, therefore the fog color is almost white. Particles smaller than a micron better scatter light rays from the blue region of the spectrum, so light, weak fogs have a bluish-blue color. Thus, everything seems clear: the fog is white or bluish-blue, and the light sources, for example, streetlights or the sun, can be red when viewed through the fog.

But then why the fog in Claude Monet's painting has such a red, even crimson, color? Is this simply the result of the artist's imagination? Or is the picture painted in the evening? This can indeed be due to the scattering of red light on large drops of water, which comes from the sunset of our luminary.

An analysis of this unusual color of fog was proposed by the scientists of the University of Birmingham and the US Naval Observatory. They analyzed not only this, but also other paintings of Monet written in London, and found that all the plots in the paintings are real, they were written in the afternoon, somewhere between February 13 and March 23, 1900. And the cause of this fog is smog red dust. Which was the proof that the ecological crisis did not begin today. Masterpieces of Monet prove his presence in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, red and gray fogs are becoming increasingly a part of the life of big cities, where the word "fog" necessarily adjoins the word "smog".

Tools