We came across the posts on the following topic on the social media platforms X, Instagram and YouTube (1, 2, 3):

The posts contain a video approximate eight seconds long that features various clips of what appears to be the ocean and men on a boat observing the waves. There is no dialogue in the short video.

Text description of the video suggests that it shows Turkish fishermen in the Aegean Sea who had encountered ‘square waves’ on the sea surface.

The Aegean Sea is where many of the Greek islands are located, and it is the body of water that separates the Greek mainland from Turkey.

Different contributors on social media attributed widely varying causes to the phenomenon. Some suggested that the waves were the result of a recent earthquake swarm in the southeast of the Aegean Sea—20,000 earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 or higher were recorded between 26 January and 22 February.

This relationship was also drawn by Haberler.com, a Turkish news outlet that was one among a few small news publications that reported on the video. However, our search did not find any mention of the event in sources that a record of credible reporting.

Other contributors suggested the waves could have been a result of environmental warfare or the use of HAARP. HAARP refers to the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, an atmospheric research programme that has been a target of conspiracy theorists as a covert US military tool of destruction that causes natural disasters.

Black Dot Research has previously debunked such claims about HAARP in relation to the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey.

Still other contributors conjectured that the video had been generated by AI.

Cross Sea, a Rare (and Sometimes Dangerous) Phenomenon

When we conducted a keyword search on the square waves, we found that they were a commonly used term to refer to the phenomenon of a cross sea.

A cross sea, also known as grid waves or square waves, forms when separate weather patterns in the region cause waves to form at different angles.

The resulting intersecting waves are known to be highly dangerous, capable of reaching 3 metres in height and have been assessed to have caused many boating accidents and shipwrecks.

While some sources also suggest they may be dangerous to swimmers and surfers, credible sources such as the UK newspaper The Guardian say that ‘there is no suggestion that cross seas with small waves close to land are dangerous to small boats, surfers or swimmers’.

The phenomenon is more common in shallow waters and in coastal regions, with Ile de Re in the west of France a well-known spot for viewing the phenomenon.

Visual Checkmate

A glance at the images from Ile de Re however reveals that the cross sea found there is dissimilar to the square waves in the video. The waves are much further apart, resulting in much larger ‘squares’, and the swell of each wave continues across the entire wave in a long straight line.

In the video, though the waves appear in a geometric pattern, at several points in the video the swell of each wave does not continue in a long unbroken line.

Video of the phenomenon found in articles on Ladbible, Sciencealert and the UK tabloid The Sun show the opposing waves breaking over one another, though the footage from each of these appears to have been shot from shore, unlike the perspective of the video in the post above, which is from a boat in the open sea.

While we found other images that appeared closer in appearance to the waves in the post, we could not verify that the images were not artificially generated or edited, and neither were we able to find the source of the images. Moreover, these images, unlike those at Ile de Re, contained no indication of the location where they were captured.

Squaring up to the Claim

Our search revealed that ‘square waves’ or cross seas are indeed a natural phenomenon that can occur. However, we could not find any images or video similar to that in the post with the claim of the phenomenon occurring in the Aegean Sea.

The video contains other signs of being generated by AI: it consists of several shots spliced together with no markers of identification to clearly indicate the location of the videos or the identities of the people in the video.

At one point in the video, which can be seen in the third image above, the square waves depicted in the video also appear to be unnaturally rigid, with sharp edges appearing in the water surface and the waves appearing to barely move in the video.

Together with the fact that no credible news outlet has verified or reported on the event or used the video, we find it to be highly likely that the video is false, and is likely generated by AI.