Did Tucker Carlson in June 2023 warn a 100-foot-wide "fissure-crack" just opened the Yellowstone volcano? No, that's not true: This video is a mashup of various recycled claims and Lead Stories could find no evidence that former Fox News host Carlson had ever issued a warning about this volcano. Lead Stories did find other videos with similar headlines. Elon Musk, Laura Ingraham and NASA have also been falsely cited in similar videos, claiming they issued this same warning about a "100 ft wide fissure-crack."
This 26-minute nine-second video was posted on Facebook by the page Enrique Benton on June 25, 2023. It was captioned:
Tucker Carlson Warns A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack JUST Opened The Yellowstone Volcano
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 19:32:45 2023 UTC)
The scope of this fact check does not include vulcanism in the Yellowstone Caldera, it is focused solely on the question of whether Carlson warned about it.
Another video on Facebook, this one only eight minutes 35 seconds long, was also posted by the page Enrique Benton on June 27, 2023. At 47 seconds into this video, it says that Carlson said this would be a "devastating natural calamity." An advanced Google search of thousands of indexed sites for that specific phrase returned no credible reports of Tucker saying it(archived here). At 23 seconds in, a graphic with a fake tweet is shown alongside an image of Carlson (pictured below). There is no record of Carlson posting a tweet saying:
It's probably a fissure crack opening from a volcano
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 20:45:25 2023 UTC)
An Advanced Google search returns no record of Carlson issuing a warning about the Yellowstone Volcano, although topping the list of search results (archived here) are similar false "spun headlines" that have minor differences in wording. These YouTube videos were posted in June 2023 by the channels Elon Musk Zone, Elon Musk Live and Elon Musk Today. The headlines are:
Tucker Carlson Warns A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack JUST Opened The Yellowstone Volcano
Tucker Carlson REVEALED a Massive Fissure-Crack OPENING in Yellowstone Volcano!
Tucker Carlson Announced A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack Just Opened Up Yellowstone Volcano in 24hrs
A search on Twitter for the phrase "100ft Wide Fissure-Crack" returned many tweets with links to YouTube. These videos (screenshots below) were posted to the channels such as Elon Musk Zone (here and here) and Future Unity and attribute the warning to different sources:
Elon Musk Warns A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack JUST Opened The Yellowstone Volcano
Laura Inagram Warns A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack JUST Opened The Yellowstone Volcan
NASA Just Announced A 100ft Wide Fissure-Crack Just Opened Up Yellowstone Volcano in 24hrs
The claim that NASA issued the warning has been fact checked (and found false) by Reuters and Check Your Fact.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image made with YouTube screenshots taken on Wed Jun 28 21:36:32 2023 UTC)
The image of the cracked landscape (center above) appears in most of these videos. This crumbling hillside is in the foothills of central Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains and was discovered in 2015. It is about 250 miles from Yellowstone National Park. Another fissure was reported in the news in 2018 when a crack opened up near Hidden Falls at Jenny Lake in the Grand Teton National Park, about 36 miles from Yellowstone.
