Image shows blue heart-shaped pond in abandoned Russian mine
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on June 18, 2021 at 15:33
- 2 min read
- By James OKONG'O, AFP South Africa
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The photo was posted here on Facebook on June 12, 2021, and has since been shared nearly 500 times.
“This pond named “God’s Hand” is found in Buchwa, Mberengwa District, Midlands province.Zimbabwe (sic),” the post’s caption reads.
The picture was also posted on Twitter on June 8, 2021, and has been retweeted over 130 times.
But the claim is false.
Pond in Crimea Russia
By performing a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found the photo in the online archives of Alamy Stock Photos. It was taken by photographer Mykola Grabchuk on April 19, 2020, and shows the blue heart-shaped pond in the abandoned Kadykovsky quarry near the Crimean town of Balaklava.
The same picture has also been published here in this Russian blog and a similar photo was published here in the online archives of Shutterstock.
Using Google Maps, AFP Fact Check confirmed that the photo shows the Kadykovsky pond in Crimea.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the picture on Google Maps (L) and the false post (R) image. The two images show the same roads and vegetation on the edge of the pond.
Google Maps also helped us locate a satellite image of the blue heart-shaped in the Kadykovsky quarry pond in Balaklava District in the Sevastopol city region.
AFP Fact Check searched for the ‘Gods Hand’ pond in Zimbabwe and couldn’t find any information about its existence.
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