Amazon Wildfire Pictures: What’s Fact and What Isn’t?
The Claim
Images show the Amazon rainforest on fire during the summer months of 2019.
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Emerging story
During the outbreak of fires in the Amazon rainforest, several websites and social media pages circulated photos claiming to show the fires. Celebrities and politicians on social media called for action to put out the fires and save the rainforest, using some of these photos to indicate a disaster that threatened Brazil's population.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar's reverse image search found that these images do not show the fires that occurred in the Amazon rainforest during the summer months of 2019. The images spread on social media took place in different areas in previous years.
The first photo is of wildfires that were recorded in southern Brazil in March 2013. The second photo, which was published by the French President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter and the American environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio on Instagram, does not illustrate the fires in summer 2019. According to the New Arab newspaper, AFP fact check sites, and the National Geographic photographer, the American photographer Loren Macintyner, who died in 2003, took the photo.
Misbar verified via the British stock image website Alamy that the image was taken by Macintyner, but could not find when the photo was captured.
The British Express newspaper reported that the Guardian said that the picture is of Amazon fires in 1989. However, Misbar did not find this picture amongst those published by the Guardian.
Misbar did find the picture published in Nature journal in 2012.
For example, this picture reveals the moment when an elephant escapes from the fire that was taken in 2007 in India. The picture depicting animals in the mid of the burning fires is due to fire flareups in the American State of Montana in 2000.
While the spread of images helped to alert people about the disaster, some were inaccurate and contributed to promoting false and misleading content.
