Dated footage shows snow in China, not California

"Snowpocalypse in Northern California buries motorists," says a March 3, 2024 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The post includes a video of several cars trapped on a mountain road, locked in by several feet of snow.

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Screenshot of an X post taken March 7, 2024

The video spread elsewhere on websites and social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Rumble.

The Sierra Nevada was hit March 1 by a storm that brought up to 11 feet of snow to some parts of the mountain range. The extreme weather generated conditions with zero visibility for drivers and gusts as high as 145 miles per hour.

Although the storm did lead to several road closures, the video shared online does not show them -- it was filmed in China in early 2023.

A reverse image search using keyframes from the clip uncovered examples of the video shared as early as January 9, 2023 on social media sites such as Weibo and X (archived here and here). The posts say the footage shows the "Kanas Scenic Area in Altay, Xinjiang."

In these older clips, a man speaks in Mandarin Chinese with a Xinjiang accent, complaining that heavy snowfall had completely covered his car.

A Xinjiang television and radio station said in a January 10, 2023, post (archived here) that the video was shot near Ka Nasi Lake, or Kanas Lake.

Zhejiang Daily and a Hubei television and radio station (archived here) also shared the recording, noting that "the trapped vehicles and people were successfully rescued on January 8."

It is not the first time the video has been misused online. A couple of weeks after the incident in 2023, posts falsely claimed it showed an avalanche in Tibet.

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about recent severe weather in California here.