Video does not show the Nile River filled with red water. It’s footage of a lagoon in Chile
FILE - An Egyptian shepherd leads his sheep as they drink water from the Nile River in Cairo, Egypt, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2015. A video spreading online does not show the river filled with red water. It’s actually footage of a Chilean lagoon. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)
CLAIM: A video shows that the Nile River recently turned red, portending catastrophes.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The video does not show the Nile River. It was filmed at a lagoon in northern Chile that is naturally red.
THE FACTS: Social media users are misrepresenting footage from the Chilean lagoon as the Nile River to suggest that its red coloring is a sign of impending doom.
“Nile River Turns Red,” reads one post on X, formerly Twitter. “For all of us believing people we know what this means.” The post had received approximately 5,700 likes and more than 2,100 shares as of Thursday.
Another post on X warned: “If you are a first born, you should be scared.”
Posts making similar claims also spread in Spanish and Portuguese.
But The Associated Press found that the video matches photographs and other footage taken in Chile’s Laguna Roja, a body of water near the northern city of Iquique that is naturally red.
For example, a mountain that appears 14 seconds into the footage can be seen in a photo of the lagoon published on a tourism website run by the Chilean government. Images on social media that identify the lagoon also show the same view.
Palmenia Ana Mamani, a tour guide in the area, confirmed to the AP that the video shows a body of water in Chile. She explained that she belongs to the indigenous Aymara people, and that the area is sacred to her community.
“It’s an intense red color, like it’s blood, but it’s not blood, it’s water,” she said in Spanish during a video call interview with the AP. “The water is transparent. What makes it turn red is its bottom.”
Mamani added that Laguna Roja and two other nearby lagoons, one of which is yellow and the other green, make up what is called Lagunas de Paricota, or the mud lakes.
“It seems strange to me that there are posts mentioning God, the Nile, blood, death or sin,” she said. “It has nothing to do with our culture and more to do with mother Pachamama. It is a magical place that has provided us with this beautiful nature, so it is not bad at all.”
Pachamama is a deity of people indigenous to the Andes who they believe protects the Earth.
Walter Sielfeld, a marine biologist who has done research in the area where Laguna Roja is located, agreed that the video shows the lagoon. He said that it is red because of mineral dyes.
On the other hand, Erik Coria, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology, explained to the AP that the water’s red appearance is a studied phenomenon normally attributed to microorganisms.
In both freshwater and water with high salt content, “the water can take on different colors,” he said in Spanish. “This is basically due to a massive proliferation of organisms that make up phytoplankton, a group of tiny organisms.”
Coria ruled out the possibility that the lagoon’s red coloring could be related to catastrophic events to come.
“From a scientific point of view, there is a relationship between the increase in these blooms with oceanic events and processes that occur on Earth such as El Niño or La Niña,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin in New York contributed to this report.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.