Nature's surprises - these unrealistic photos will make you want to look twice

You can create a lot of amazing things with Photoshop, but Mother Nature is no stranger to creating optical illusions just as well. The planet is full of breathtaking natural phenomena, seeing which you simply cannot believe your eyes. And even though there are understandable explanations for each of these phenomena, they still don’t look any less amazing.

“Underwater whirlwind” off the coast of the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. This optical illusion is caused by the accumulation of silt and sand.

No, there were no aliens here. This may look like a trace of a UFO in the sky, but in fact, such regular-shaped holes in the clouds appear due to the fact that supercooled drops of water freeze and fall to the ground when an airplane passes through the cloud.

At first glance, it looks like the boys are jumping into an abyss, but in fact they are about to dive into the crystal clear water of a karst spring called Jacob's Well (Texas, USA).

No, this is not a masterpiece of one of the impressionists. These are polar stratospheric clouds that are often visible to residents of Norway and other polar regions.

This unearthly landscape looks more like a drawing than a photograph. But still, this picture exists in reality: bright red dunes and trees can be found at the bottom of a dry lake in Namibia.

At first glance it may seem that this is some distant planet with three luminaries in the sky, but in fact this optical phenomenon is called parhelium. It occurs from time to time due to a special type of refraction of light striking ice crystals floating in the atmosphere.

Layers of unevenly eroded sedimentary rocks in the Vermilion Cliffs National Forest (Arizona, USA) look like a giant painting.

Dead trees in the snow? In fact, the “branches” are the beds of small rivers making their way through the desert in the state of Baja California (Mexico).

It may seem to you that this man is one step away from death, but in fact he is calmly walking along a river bed in Utah (USA).

This phenomenon is called the Fire Whirlwind. The fact is that in the upper reaches of the Rio Tinto River (Andalusia, Spain) mining has been going on for more than 3,000 years, which leads to increased acidity of the water, and this, in turn, can affect the appearance of such frightening natural phenomena.

These pastoral hills in Washington State, USA, look like a painting in certain lighting.

This type of bizarrely shaped cloud is called Undulatus Asperatus (Latin for “wavy-lumpy”).

Colorful hills in China's Danxia Geological Park.

Horsetail Falls in Yosemite National Park (California, USA).

A bloody waterfall in Antarctica that looks like a terrible battlefield. The brightness of the color is due to the high concentration of iron oxide in the water.