Visuals of buildings in ruins and rescue teams teaming up to help people trapped under the rubble have surfaced online in the wake of the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria. As the rescue operations continue, a few social media posts (here and here) are being shared with a claim that these visuals allegedly show a Tsunami that hit Turkey after the earthquake. Let’s fact-check the claim made in these posts through this article.
Update (08 February 2023):
Another video is being shared on social media, claiming it to be an alleged Tsunami wave hitting the coastline of Turkey and Syria. Let’s find out the truth behind this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of a Tsunami wave hitting the coastline of Turkey and Syria.
Fact: The viral video is old and was shot when a Tsunami hit Greenland in 2017. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To learn more details about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search using a few keyframes. This led us to a YouTube video from 2021 which contained the visuals of the 2017 Greenland Tsunami (here). This video has the same visuals as in the viral post. This video from 2017 is being falsely peddled as the visuals of an alleged Tsunami that occurred after the recent Earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria. Click here and here to learn more about the Greenland Tsunami.
Published (07 February 2023):
Calim: Visuals of Tsunami waves that hit Turkey after the earthquake on 06 February 2023.
Fact: The viral posts contain videos from two different incidents from the past. One shows the visuals of a Tsunami wave approaching the seashore, shot during the 2018 Indonesian Earthquake-Tsunami. The second one is from 2017, filmed on Durban beach, South Africa, when huge waves hit the shore. Hence the claims made in these posts is FALSE.
We performed a reverse image search using a few screenshots of the video we obtained after running it through the InVID tool. Searching with these on the internet led us to a few news reports from 2018, which contained the same visuals from the viral video.
Reportedly, this video was shot when Tsunami waves hit the Island of Sulawesi after an earthquake shook the Island earlier. News reports of this incident can be read here and here.
To learn more details about the video, we performed a simple keyword search on YouTube using the words’ Tsunami visuals’. This search led us to a video titled ‘Durban beach closed due to high waves DRAMATIC AERIAL VIDEO,‘ which has the same visuals as the viral video.
As per news reports (here and here), this video was taken in 2017 when massive waves hit Durban North Beach in South Africa. ‘Three people were killed and more than a dozen others injured when a monster “freak wave” struck a packed beach in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban Sunday,‘ the NY Post reported. It is thus clear that the visuals do not belong to the earthquake that struck Turkey on 06 February 2023 and the post falsely attributes the old visuals to the recent incident.
To sum up, old and unrelated videos are shared as the visuals of Turkey’s coast hit by the Tsunami after the recent earthquake
