Old Video From China Passed Off as Crack in Land Caused by Turkey Earthquake
This is an old video from China's Shanxi province and is not related to the earthquakes in Turkey or Syria.
Fact-check: The video is not related to earthquakes that happened in Turkey and Syria.
(Photo: Altered by The Quint)
A video showing a massive crack in the land is going viral on social media with a claim that it shows a 300-kilometre-long crack in the Earth's crust caused by strong earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
An archive can be seen here.
At the time of writing this article, the viral video had garnered over 3,05,000 views on Twitter.
(Archives of similar claims can be seen here, here, and here.)
What's the truth?: We found an older version of the video, which was uploaded on the internet on 4 November 2022. This predates the earthquakes.
The video caption mentioned that it showed a fissure located in Pinglu county of China's southern Shanxi province.
How did we find out the truth?: We performed a reverse image search on some of the keyframes of the video and found a longer version of the viral video on YouTube.
This video was uploaded on YouTube on 4 November 2022.
The translated title of the video mentioned that these visuals were from China's Pinglu County.
We found another YouTube video, which was published on 19 November 2022.
The description of this video said that they showed a huge crack in Pinglu County, Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, which separated houses on both sides.
Visuals on Google Earth: We located the cracks situated in Pinglu County on Google Earth and compared the visuals with the viral video to note the similarities.
The viral video is from China.
Reports about a massive crack in China: A Chinese website Zhihu, carried a similar video and stated that it was a 10-kilometre-long crack on the Earth's surface.
We found a similar video of the cracks on Douyin, a TikTok application used in China.
We found another video on a video sharing platform Bili bili, which stated that this wide crack in located in southern Shanxi.
Conclusion: An old video showing a massive crack on the land is neither from Turkey nor from Syria.
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