In November 2023, news spread across the Internet that the water in the Nile had turned red. We decided to check if this is true.

The video of the rushing red river became the most popular in TikTok. There rollers with signatures in Russian, English and other languages gaining millions views and hundreds of thousands likes. Many users see in this prophecy about the end of the world and remember verse 16:3 from the Revelation of the Apostle John: “The second angel poured out his cup into the sea, and the blood became like that of a dead man, and everything with life died in the sea.” Other thinkthat this is a sign of the imminent appearance of the Mahdi, the successor of the Prophet Muhammad in Islam, whose arrival heralds the end of the world. Sometimes to videos with a scarlet pond add and satellite images - in them the Nile also looks blood red. The video of the red river has also spread on other platforms, such as YouTube, "VKontakte" And Instagram*.

The same video about 20 seconds long is being circulated on social networks and video content platforms, where nothing indicates that the action is taking place in Egypt and the footage shows the Nile. Despite the fact that this is a remarkable phenomenon, no other Egyptian residents or tourists have posted other videos or pictures. Moreover, over the same period of time in Instagram many photo And video, where the water in the main river of Egypt is a completely normal color. “Verified” could not find information about the reddened Nile in reputable media.

Changing the color of water in reservoirs or even fountains is a very real, scientifically explainable phenomenon, which, however, invariably provokes talk about the end of the world. So, in 2014, in one of the villages in the northwest Spain The water in the fountains suddenly turned red, scaring the residents. It turned out that with the rain the day before, microscopic red algae got into the water. And in Chile there is a lake called Laguna Roja (translated from Spanish as “red lagoon”), the waters of which are always painted blood red, and, according to some data, the reason for this colors also in algae. By the way, if you look carefully video from the shores of the Chilean lake, you can see that the landscape of the surrounding shores is very similar to the surroundings of the scarlet reservoir in the video that went viral - the same terrain and color of the soil. “Verified” was unable to find the original source of the viral video supposedly from the banks of the Nile, but it can be assumed that whoever first published the video indicating that it was happening in Egypt either made a mistake or deliberately decided to “tailor” the video to the prophecy of the Apocalypse.

Source: video screenshots, left - TikTok hotnewsk, right - YouTube Aventura South America

As for the satellite image, which supposedly shows that the water throughout the Nile has turned red, using a Google image search we were able to find out: the photo is by no means new - it was made back in 2016 by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-3A satellite. At the same time, the agency itself, which shared the photo on its Facebook page*, explained, why the Nile is red in the image: this is what vegetation looks like, visible in the infrared range of the satellite's radiometer. Then, however, some impressionable users also remembered about biblical prophecies.

Source: Facebook ESA - European Space Agency

Thus, there is no evidence that the water in the Nile River in November 2023 somehow changed its color. The only 20-second video that has gone viral on the Internet appears to have been filmed not in Egypt, but in Chile, on the shores of Lake Laguna Roja, where the color of the water is bright scarlet due to microalgae. Satellite images, in which the Nile is also colored red, distort the real shades - this is how the vegetation of the river looks in the infrared range of the radiometer.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: TikTok screenshot hotnewsk