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A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple social media posts alongside a claim it shows the movement of the Earth's crust that was recently filmed in Inner Mongolia, in northern China. This is false . The video has circulated since September 2017 in reports about a landslide in the northwestern province of Qinghai. The video was posted on Twitter here on May 6, 2022. It has been viewed more than 20,000 times. It shows a crowd of people watching mud and grass flowing through a verdant valley. The tweet's simplified Chinese-language caption translates to English as: Crustal movement occurred on May 4, 2022 at 10:15am in Dongwu Banner, Ximeng, Inner Mongolia. This is the first time China has used video to record crustal movement! Inner Mongolia is a landlocked autonomous region in northern China. A screenshot of the misleading post, taken on May 25, 2022 The video was viewed more than 60,000 times on Twitter here alongside the same claim. The video was previously shared on Weibo here with superimposed text falsely claiming it was filmed on May 3, 2021. There have been no official reports about a crustal movement in early May in Inner Mongolia as of May 31, 2022. Qinghai landslide After the video recirculated online in May 2022, the state-run China Environment Newspaper Agency reported that the video was filmed on September 7, 2017. The report states the clip was filmed in China's northwestern Qinghai province and does not show an example of crustal movement. A reverse image search on Google subsequently found a similar video was published in a news report by local Chinese news organisation Kanka News on September 13, 2017. Thawed mudflow in Qinghai tears up the turf wherever it goes, like a bulldozer passing by, reads the report's headline. The report goes on to say: A high mountain collapse occurred around 9 am on September 7 in the pasture of Zhimei Village, Zaduo Town, Chenduo County, Yushu Prefecture, Qinghai Province. Qinghai province is a landlocked province in China's northwest. Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading post (left) and the Kanka News video (right): A screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading post (left) and the Kanka News video (right) Similar images of the mudslide were also published in reports by the South China Morning Post and The Beijing News newspapers in September 2017. On September 13, 2017, National Geographic described the phenomenon shown in the video as an earthflow, a type of landslide. The report goes on to say that there is speculation that the earthflow was caused by the melting of permafrost -- ground that has remained permanently frozen for at least two years straight -- but scientists were unable to determine this from the video alone. On September 12, 2017, the China Environment Newspaper Agency issued a statement on the Chinese news platform Toutiao explaining that thawed mudflow is a unique landform found in permafrost regions, mostly on slopes that face the sun or ravines.
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