Video: The sky turns red unexpectedly. The Chinese panicked and said, “Judgment day has come”

The skies over the eastern Chinese city of Zhushan turned blood red over the weekend. The unexpected color spectrum above the heads of the city, located just outside of Lockdown Shanghai, caused bewilderment and panic.

The Red Sky, which appeared over the city of Zhushan on Saturday, also dominated social networks. On Weibo, like Twitter, videos and photos of the sky have gained more than 150 million views.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It amazes me that the sky turns red like this,” says one of the creators of the widely shared video. Some attributed the color of the sky to the alleged fire – but firefighters said the fire had burned nowhere in the area.

This created space for strictly non-scientific theories.

Some users concluded that the red sky over China heralded a “doomsday”. Due to the proximity of Zhushan and Shanghai, some have come to believe that the coronavirus apocalypse is coming soon. Others on the Douyin platform, the Chinese equivalent of TikToku, have predicted that within seven days a devastating earthquake will hit China.

Doomsday scenarios thus drowned out the voices of people reminding that red is a symbol of good luck in China.

The local weather station confirmed that there was nothing supernatural at the scene. It was foggy and cloudy and drizzling in Zhushan on Saturday. Ideal conditions for refraction and light scattering play.

The fishing company confirmed to state television CCTV that its offshore vessels illuminate the world, its reflection returning to the sky after hitting the surface. According to experts, a similar phenomenon is common in coastal areas.

“When the weather is nice, more water is produced in the atmosphere by aerosols that refract and scatter the light of the fishing boats and create the red sky that the Zhou Shao people see,” meteorology staff told Chinese media.

Knowing history on social networks, the Chinese remember the year 1770, when the sky turned red for nine days. This phenomenon has been recorded not only in China, but also in South Korea, Japan and parts of Europe. 240 years later, Japanese scientists made a statement – the bloody color that frightened the emperor for several days was actually a red aurora borealis caused by massive solar activity.

It is a type of color phenomenon that occurs when a stream of charged particles from the sun (solar wind) enters the earth’s magnetic field. At night, a bright and beautiful light appears near the Earth’s north and south poles. At the South Pole it is called the aurora australis, at the North Pole it is called the aurora borealis.

In most cases, charged particles produced by the sun are directed to the poles by the geomagnetic field, so auroras are usually only visible at high latitudes. However, there is also aurora borealis in low and mid latitudes.

A similar scene with increased solar activity can be seen by Americans in Florida, located at 30 degrees north latitude. Similar records exist from many regions below 45° north latitude, the so-called “micropolar radiation zone”.

This time, however, Chinese meteorologists reported that the sun’s activity was relatively calm and there were no major eruptions or sunspots. The blood-red sky in Zhushan in Zhejiang Province was probably caused not by solar activity, but by a combination of a strong light source and good scattering conditions.