Does a viral TikTok video of disaster scenes document the impacts of an earthquake in Alaska? No, that's not true: The opening shot was taken in Taiwan and the other eight clips that make up the video were either not captured in Alaska, taken before the July 2025 Alaskan quake referred to in the TikTok video, or untraceable to Alaska. Reverse image searches reveal most weren't even shot in the same hemisphere as Alaska.
The video appeared in a July 17, 2025 TikTok post (archived here) by the @disaster.us2025 account, captioned:
A magnitude 7.3 earthquake occurred today about 54 miles from Sand Point, Alaska.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of TikTok post by @disaster.us2025 account.)
Without links or other means of independent verification, the mashup video claims to show scenes of the magnitude 7.3 earthquake the US Geological Survey measured (archived here) in the area around Sand Point, Alaska on July 16, 2025. Lead Stories tracked seven of the nine clips, finding five were not from the U.S., one U.S. clip predated the Alaska earthquake by a year and another of an indeterminate location predated the Alaska temblor by more than one month.
The chart below summarizes our findings:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshots of TikTok post by @disaster.us2025 account made into graphic by Lead Stories.)
Clip 1: The first scene shows hikers in southeastern Taiwan knocked to the ground by a 6.8 magnitude quake on Zhuoxi Mountain on September 18, 2022. The clip was posted the next day by TaiwanNews.com (archived here), which credited it to the Facebook page of the Panita Mountaineering Association of Hualien County.
Clip 2, of earthquake disturbances in the water of a pond ringed by palm trees, is captioned "Sukhothai", which is a province and city in northern Thailand. The earliest version of the pond video Lead Stories located was posted March 28, 2025 to the Facebook page of Thai blogger KKSakaeoBanRao. That video, and a series of still screenshots like this (archived here), were posted in the aftermath of the deadly March 28, 2025 earthquake reported by CNN in neighboring Myanmar (archived here).
Clip 3, of a man swimming in a rooftop pool during an earthquake, matches verified video posted by The BBC (archived here) in its coverage of the Taipei, Taiwan earthquake of April 3, 2024.
Clip 4, of a woman talking while water sloshes a backyard swimming pool, was posted to social media after the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck off the California coast May 12, 2025. The watermark caption "Terremoto. Lo siento." is a translation on the version (archived here) posted by Alo Noticias, a news channel's Instagram account based in the Dominican Republic.
Clip 5, of displays shaking in a shopping mall with non-English signage, was posted in a November 15, 2024 reel on the jones.dugan Facebook page, based in The Philippines. The reel, which opens with the same Taiwan hiker video used in the video that is the subject of this fact check, was captioned "Grabe magnitude 8 Ang lindol sa Taiwan", which Google Translate read as "Taiwan earthquake: Strong magnitude 8". The date of the post does not match that of any major quake in Taiwan or the Philippines.
Lead Stories was unsuccessful in finding a matching video to Clip 6, of a heavy curtain and a toppling shoe rack in a modern apartment. Nothing in the video links it to Alaska or to an earthquake.
Clip 7, of a flood-lashed commercial district with green and brown trash carts in the foreground, shows Japan during a tsunami in 2011, which was established by AFP in a 2019 fact check of a similar mis-labelling of the footage (archived here). Lead Stories found the original March 11, 2011 video on the @ts234567 account on YouTube
Clip 8, of a water sloshing out of a barrel elevated above head height on a wooden stand, precisely matches the thumbnail of a video that is no longer public. An online TikTok URL decoder derived the date it was posted: July 12, 2025, which is four days before the Alaska earthquake.
Lead Stories was unsuccessful in finding a matching video to Clip 9, of sidewalk drains spouting water upward. Nothing in the video links it to Alaska or to an earthquake.
Readers interested in more Lead Stories fact checks about Alaska earthquakes will find them collected here.
