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| - Fact Check: This video doesn't show deep cracks caused by recent tremors in Turkey and Syria
Aerial footage of 300 km-long fissure has been making the rounds on social media with many claiming that the crack appeared following the 6.4 magnitude tremor that hit Turkey and Syria on February 20.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from the Pinglu region in China and has nothing to do with the devastating quakes in Turkey and Syria.
Just two weeks after a series of quakes left thousands dead and millions homeless in Turkey and Syria, a 6.4-magnitude tremor struck the border region of the two countries on February 20. But did these deadly quakes leave a long crack on Earth's surface?
Several people on social media are now sharing aerial footage of 300 km-long fissure that they claimed appeared in the aftermath of the recent quakes in the Turkey-Syria region.
AFWA found that the video in question is from China and is not related to the recent quakes in Turkey and Syria.
AFWA PROBE
As per media reports, the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on February 6 created two ruptures on land. According to researchers from the UK's Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET), the longest of the two fissures stretches 300 kilometres northeast from the Mediterranean Sea's northeastern tip.
However, is the viral video related to the recent earthquakes?
A reverse search of the video led us to a longer version of the same clip shared by an Instagram account on December 6, 2021. This confirmed the video is old and not related to the recent tremors in Turkey and Syria.
The video was also shared by several Chinese YouTube channels in 2022. According to these channels, it was from Pinglu county in the southern Shanxi province of China.
Using relevant keywords in the Chinese language, we searched and found satellite images of the viral video's location and its coordinates uploaded by people on Zhihu, a Quora-like question-and-answer website based in China.
Using the coordinates, we located the fissure on Google Maps. A comparison of the longer version of the viral video with the Google Earth view of the area helped us find multiple similarities between the two. This confirmed the video is indeed from Pinglu County. The oldest satellite view of the location available on Google Earth is from 1985. The crack can be spotted at the same position even in the earliest version.
According to various travel blogs, the fissure is named after Zhou Cang, a fictional character in the 14th-century Chinese historical novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. Also, as per these sites, this fissure is around 10 km long. We also found different videos of the same fissure on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
It is hence clear that the video in question is old and has nothing to do with the quakes in Turkey or Syria.
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