Video from Nepal viral as glacier breaking off in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli

A portion of the Nanda Devi glacier broke off in the early hours of February 7^th triggering off an avalanche and subsequent floods that washed away several hydroelectric stations and homes, leaving at least 18 people dead and over 100 missing until last reports.

Amidst this a video of a huge mass of snow sliding down a mountain is doing rounds on social media claiming that it shows the glacier burst in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli on Sunday 7^th February, 2021.

The caption of the post mentions “Video of glacier breaking off in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli”.

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Fact Check-

We started our investigation by using the InVid-We Verify Tool to break the video into small key frames and then running a reverse image search for the same, which led us to a similar video published by an Instagram user with the caption stating the following “Huge Avalanche at Kapuche Lake. Here comes full video of huge avalanche, had to spend overnight at Kapuche lake (Lowest altitude glacier lake in the world) in order to catch this moment and it eventually paid off” The video was uploaded 4 weeks ago.

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Thus, taking a cue from this we ran a keyword search on Google which led us to the same longer version of the video on Youtube uploaded on 11th January 2021 claiming it to be from “Huge Avalanche at Kapuche Lake ( Lowest Altitude Glacier Lake In Nepal)”

The description of the video mentions “Huge Avalanche (हिम नदी) at Kapuche Lake Sikles. The Kapuche Glacier lake is located at an altitude of 2546 meters from sea level. It lies inside the small village Sikles of Kaski district in the Annapurna region. This lake has been declared the lowest altitude glacier lake in the world. We had to spend overnight at lake in order to catch this moment and it eventually paid off we were filming ourselves and all of sudden avalanche started, rest is history.”

We also found media reports dated 26^th January 2021 claiming that the video is from Parche, Gandaki, Nepal. It mentions that the incident took place on 11^th January 2021. The report mentions the slide sent kayakers scrambling but fortunately, no one was hurt.

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Conclusion- Fact Crescendo found that the viral video is False. The video is not from Chamoli, Uttarakhand. The video dates back to 11^th January 2021 and is of an avalanche at Kapuche Glacier Lake in Nepal.