Authors
An awe-inspiring video showing a mountain spewing a thick tower of ash in the background having a serene waterfall in a rainforest in the foreground is being widely shared on social media, claiming that it showed the recent volcanic eruption in Mount Semeru in Java, Indonesia.
Newschecker found the video to be edited, with two separate images, one, showing a volcanic eruption in Chile and another showing the Tumpak Sewua waterfalls in Java combined together using CGI technology.
The seven-second-long video shared by Twitter account @scientists_feed has garnered over 600,000 views and over 6000 retweets since December 07.
An archived link to the Tweet can be accessed here.
Several Twitter users shared the video with the caption, ‘Semeru Mountain volcanic eruption from 2 days ago..’
The video has also been widely shared on Facebook following the recent volcanic eruption in Indonesia on December 04 which killed at least 34 people in the Lumajang district of East Java province. Ash of over 12,000 meters has reportedly been spewed from the volcano in the sudden eruption, which has caused several villages to be buried in a thick layer of ash and mud.
Factcheck/Verification
To check the authenticity of the video Newschecker ran a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the video and found several wallpaper websites. One such website called wallpapers13.com shows a volcano spewing ash that seems indistinguishable from the volcano seen in the viral video.
The title of the photo reads, ‘Volcanic Eruption Calbuco Volcano In Chile On April 22, 2015.’
Using the caption as a clue, Newschecker ran a keyword search and found the same image on the stock photo website, Alamy.
On further research, it was found that Calbuco Volcano in southern Chile had erupted for the first time in over four decades in April 2015. The visuals from the Calbuco have been falsely linked to the recent Indonesian volcanic eruption.
Further, on separating the waterfall from the keyframe and running a reverse image search, we found results for the Tumpak Sewua waterfalls in Java, Indonesia.
On comparing an image of the waterfall posted by Lovepik, a stock photo website with the waterfall seen in the viral video, we found them to be a perfect match.
Conclusion
The video claiming to show the recent volcanic eruption in Mount Semeru is fabricated. The video contains two separate images clubbed together.
Result: Fabricated
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