Photos of the Grand Canyon Turning into a Sea of Clouds During a ‘Total Inversion’

Last week, visitors to the Grand Canyon were treated with a rare visual treat: the canyon was filled with a sea of clouds due to a rare weather phenomenon known as a “total inversion.”

Employees of the National Park Service were on hand and captured a number of photographs of the scene, which can be seen on the service’s Flickr page. They also released this time-lapse video that condenses 15 minutes of the “sea’s” ebb and flow into one minute:

Total inversions occur when cool, damp air gets trapped inside the canyon by warm air floating above. It’s a somewhat rare phenomenon, occurring once every several years, but there was another occurrence in late 2013.

Here’s another video showing how rapidly the fog moves:

A video posted by GrandCanyonNPS (@grandcanyonnps) on Dec 12, 2014 at 3:10am PST

(H/T LaughingSquid)

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Image credit: Photographs by the National Park Service