Doomsday Clouds Appear Over Canada: Could This Be The Last Time We See Them?

There were some very strange clouds in the sky over Canada recently, which looked very similar to a famous painting by the famous artist Van Gogh. They are called "apocalyptic clouds" , and why do scientists say this is very likely the "first and last time" we will see them?

Even people who are not art connoisseurs probably know Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night because it is so famous. It is easy to see it online, but not everyone has the opportunity to see it in person.

However, recently, people in Ottawa (Canada) seemed to be admiring the real version of that work. That is because in the morning, suddenly the sky here had strange clouds, looking very similar to the above painting.

The sky looks strange in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Ann Martin).

In the images taken in Ottawa, the sky is covered in rolling gray clouds. Light filters through some of the cloudy sky, creating a stark contrast between gray and white. And so the sky looks like a strange black and white painting.

This image of clouds quickly received hundreds of thousands of likes and tens of thousands of shares. Netizens wrote that they had never seen clouds like this, and admitted that the sky really looked like the work Starry Night .

"Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA)).

According to CBC , these are asperitas , or apocalyptic clouds , which were only recognized by the International Cloud Atlas in 2017. They look dark and scary, but they're not actually related to the 'apocalypse' . Meteorologists don't fully understand how these clouds form. They only think that asperitas can appear before or after thunderstorms, but sometimes there's no thunderstorm at all.

The sky looks like a black and white painting. (Photo: Ann Martin).

Meteorologists say that apocalyptic clouds are considered the rarest type of cloud on Earth, so this 'could be the first and last time we see them'. In addition, apocalyptic clouds normally look like gray ripples, but this time the clouds rolled evenly and had a strange light shining through them, creating an image very similar to Van Gogh's painting, so it can be said that this is a 'once-in-a-lifetime' phenomenon .