The mountainous regions of eastern Europe changed colour this past weekend, all thanks to some orange sand from north Africa.

That’s a far way to travel, so how did it get there?

Well, the cause was an apparent dust storm in the Sahara desert that blew a mix of sand, dust and pollen particles over the Mediterranean, turning the snow falling over the Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria and Romania orange.

According the meteorologists, the phenomenon occurs roughly every five years, explains The Guardian:

Steven Keates, a weather forecaster at the UK’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.”

Thanks to an app called Instagram, skiers and snowboarders posted photographs of the unusual, Mars-like surfaces:

It’s like the opposite of when snow fell in the Sahara desert.

[source:theguardian]