The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once likened San Francisco to a place that “drifts anchorless upon the ocean.”

The metaphor comes to life with the city’s signature fog, which pours over the hills in slow-motion waves of white. On the ground, the experience can be dreary, “like living inside a great gray pearl,” as Herb Caen once put it. But viewed from above, the fog resembles the sea itself, upon which bits of the skyline appear like lighthouses or ship masts.

Below, six views of San Francisco submerged.

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