Gordon Busenbark, age 12, of Bountiful, Utah, for his question:

 Why does a mirage look like water?

There are several different types of mirages and some of them look like water. Driving along on a summer day, we often see a mirage on the road ahead which looks for all the world like a wide puddle or a quiet little lake. This is because the surface of calm water acts like a mirror. It reflects the scenery around it, showing us upside down images of trees and other objects. It also reflects the sky above, which explains the heavenly blue color of a quiet lake. A mirage also reflects objects around it, especially the sky above. But its method of copying the scenery is somewhat different from that of a lake.

A mirage on the road is caused by sandwiches of warmer and cooler air. The sum¬mery air swarms with dancing sunbeams of light and light plays all sorts of complicated tricks with the scenery. It strikes a tree, for example, and some of it bounces back to bring a colored image of the tree to our eyes. In the mirage, it bounces between the warmer and cooler layers of sir. And as it bounces it takes along its images. It turns an Image of the sky upside down so that we see it on the road. This makes the mirage ahead look like water, shiny wet with a mirrored image of the sky.