Unusual orange snow in Russia's Sochi, home of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, got its strange hue from sand and dust from the Sahara and Arabian deserts far to the south.
The resort looked a bit like Mars as debris from the deserts blew up into the atmosphere and mixed with already-forming Russian snow, meteorologists told ABC News.
"There has been a lot of lifted sand or dust originating from North Africa and the Sahara, from sand storms which have formed in the desert," Steven Keates, of the United Kingdom's Met Office, told The Independent.
"As the sand gets lifted to the upper levels of the atmosphere, it gets distributed elsewhere. Looking at satellite imagery from NASA, it shows a lot of sand and dust in the atmosphere drifting across the Mediterranean. When it rains or snows, it drags down whatever is up there, if there is sand in the atmosphere."
ABC News said orange snow was also spotted at Mount Elbrus, more than 100 miles from Rosa Khutor, where an avalanche of the colorful pack buried 15 cars in a nearby parking lot.
The Guardian said a similar phenomenon happened in 2007 when "oily" orange snow fell across three regions of southern Siberia.
Some on social media took an amazed and humorous look at the strange colored snow.
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