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Instagram posts

stated on December 11, 2024 in an Instagram post:

Video shows “Yellowstone’s super volcano is now really, really exploding.”

By Loreben Tuquero December 17, 2024

A video doesn’t show Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. It’s an old clip taken in Indonesia

If Your Time is short

The video shows Indonesia’s Mount Dukono in August, not Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park in December.
Mount Dukono is in continuing eruption status, which means it has eruptive events with breaks that are no longer than three months.
Yellowstone, dubbed a "supervolcano," has erupted three times in 2.1 million years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The last time was 70,000 years ago.

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It’s a terrifying scene. Massive plumes of dark smoke billow behind a rock formation as people seek to escape, running down a mountainside.

"Yellowstone’s supervolcano is now really, really exploding," the caption of the Dec. 11 Instagram video read. A man narrating the video said the explosion happened "yesterday," and said scientists believe "this is probably going to cause five years of total darkness in the U.S."

(Screenshot from Instagram)

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

This video is real, but it was not captured at Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park. The footage was recorded in August in on Indonesia’s Mount Dukono in North Halmahera.

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Al Jazeera attributed the video to the Instagram account @anak_esa, which uploaded it Aug. 17. That account regularly posts drone footage from Indonesian hiking trips.

As of Oct. 17, the Smithsonian Institution counted Dukono as being in continuing eruption status. Such status doesn’t mean "persistent daily activity," the institution said, but indicates "intermittent eruptive events without a break of 3 months or more." Dukono’s eruption started Aug. 13, 1933.

Facebook posts

stated on November 22, 2024 in a Facebook post

Celebrities including Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Robert Downey Jr., John Legend and Tom Hanks have announced they are leaving the U.S. following the 2024 election.

Yellowstone is dubbed a "supervolcano" — one with a volcanic center having an "eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index" — and it has erupted three times in 2.1 million years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency said it last erupted 70,000 years ago.

Yellowstone National Park’s Biscuit Basin had a hydrothermal explosion in July, but the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory said that was likely because of a "change in the hot-water reservoir in the shallow subsurface." It was not caused by volcanic activity, and such hydrothermal explosions are common in Yellowstone, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The observatory’s Dec. 2 update said Yellowstone’s volcano alert level was "normal."

This video doesn’t show Yellowstone erupting. We rate that False.