Overview
- Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau produced ash plumes and a loud acoustic wave on Saturday, September 5, prompting temporary closure of eight airports and disrupting thousands of flights and travellers.
- Satellite images and local agencies confirmed ash drifted as far as Jakarta and caused school closures and air‑quality warnings for affected communities.
- News verifiers traced one widely shared clip to a June storm filmed in Agua Escondida, El Salvador, and found its audio had been overlaid with unrelated Indonesian-sounding speech.
- A second viral video was identified as an uncropped and slowed segment of a 2018 nighttime eruption shot by photographer Martin Rietze that had been cropped and sped up before recirculation.
- Reporters used reverse-image searches, licensing records and original uploads to establish provenance, a process that corrects the record and helps authorities focus on monitoring, exclusion zones and public-health advice for ash exposure.