BBC admits using digital fakery to spice up shots of Chilean volcano erupting

The Calbuco volcano erupting on April 30, 2015 in Puerto Montt, Chile. Photo / Getty Images

The BBC has admitted that footage of a volcanic eruption featured in its blockbuster natural history series Patagonia: Earth's Secret Paradise was faked.

The scene, purporting to depict a single volcano in eruption, was actually created by splicing together eruptions from two separate volcanoes. One eruption was in 2011, the other in 2015. The admission is likely to trigger a new row over the use of digital techniques to make documentaries more dramatic. Staff at the BBC Natural History Unit were said to be angry about the inclusion of the doctored scene, which they fear could erode trust in their output.

The row comes after a battle in 2011 over the BBC's natural history series Frozen Planet, which contained footage that was said to show polar bears being born in the wild when it was filmed at a man-made den in a German animal park.

Several senior BBC executives will have viewed the latest programme before its transmission, and staff told the Observer it was inconceivable no one would have questioned how such a powerful, dramatic scene had been filmed.

The scene shows lightning around the volcano Calbuco in southern Chile as it erupts. As it belches thick clouds of ash into the atmosphere, a tracery of vivid lightning flashes can be see around the cone. The sequence was watched by hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube and registered 300,000 likes and 500,000 shares on Facebook.

It now emerges that the lightning strikes occurred four years earlier in the sky above a different volcano and were added to make the scene more dramatic. No mention of this manipulation was made.

The programme's producer, Tuppence Stone, explained in a blogpost that events known as "dirty thunderstorms" sometimes occurred near erupting volcanoes, but these were very difficult to film. "We took time-lapse images from the Calbuco volcano ... and the lightning shots were superimposed on to the erupting cloud. The lightning shots were taken ... of a nearby Patagonian volcano, Cordon Caulle, during its eruption four years earlier ... a very similar event to the Calbuco volcano this year." The BBC issued a statement which included an admission that it should have made it clear that the scene had been manipulated "in order to show viewers the extraordinary spectacle of a dirty thunderstorm with lightning flashes that would be impossible to capture in a single camera".

- Observer