No, Italy's Lake Como has not dried up, despite viral AI video

A video circulating on X and TikTok, viewed more than 600,000 times, claims that Lake Como, one of northern Italy's most famous landscapes, has completely dried up. The narrator describes the lake as having turned into a vast field of mud, rocks and stranded boats, attributing the supposed disaster to a "geological rupture." The footage was said to have first been filmed in Bellagio, a town on the lake's shore.

The video is fake

The clip was traced back to a TikTok account called @naturevsia, whose profile description openly states it produces "AI News" and carries a warning that all its content is AI-generated, meaning it is a fabricated media outlet designed to spread sensational and false content. Despite the disclaimer, a number of viewers believed the video was genuine, including some users in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi.

What satellite images show

An image captured by the European Sentinel 2 satellite on August 13, available via the Copernicus website, shows Lake Como, which has a 170-kilometre perimeter, still full of water. Webcam footage from the town of Tremezzo, west of Bellagio, recorded on August 14, likewise shows no drop in water levels in that part of the lake, directly contradicting the claims made in the video.

Drought is a real, smaller factor

While the lake has not dried up due to any "geological rupture," its water levels have genuinely been affected by drought. Italian outlet La Provincia di Como reported that by August 1, water levels had fallen at least 30.2 centimetres below the hydrographic zero mark, nearing the lowest levels recorded four years earlier. However, this decline does not mean the lake is at risk of disappearing, as its maximum depth reaches 418 metres.