In what looks similar to some sort of Biblical miracle or a real life “Sharknado”, large live fish fell from the sky in Yasouj, a city in Central Iran, and were left flapping on the road, a video posted on local social media purportedly shows.

The post swiftly went viral across social media platforms in Iran. The footage, filmed by a local resident, shows fish plummeting from the sky onto a square within the city. The videographer even picked up one of the fish from the ground which was still alive and wiggling.

Comments on social media speculated that some sort of typhoon or a whirlwind over water had sucked up the fish and then dumped them again as rain shortly afterwards.

That theory is not entirely impossible. As bne IntelliNews reported, global warming means the atmosphere is sucking up vast quantities of water this year and releasing it again as torrential rainfall: hotter air can absorb more water and last year was the hottest year on record. Only a week ago Dubai was hit with an entire year’s worth of rainfall in a single day, turning the international airport into a lake and flooding the subway. The rainfall was so extreme that a caravan of camels in the desert outside the city were caught in flash floods after a local river burst its banks.

With the temperature of the seas currently at fresh all-time highs, that is providing the energy for extreme wind events and last year saw tornadoes and tropical storms form over seas that sucked up huge quantities of water in Florida and other places. These events are becoming increasingly common.

Off the coast of North Africa, the Mediterranean was hit by the tropical cyclone Storm Daniel last September that killed over 10,000 people in just a few hours and it left a trail of destruction across the north African coast. Storm Daniel was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Mediterranean, fuelled by record bath-like temperatures of the sea. As disaster season gets underway this year, as bne IntelliNews has reported, the sea’s temperatures are already higher than they were last year, setting a fresh all-time record high.

bne IntelliNews has been unable to confirm the veracity of the Iranian fish video, but it is not the first-time fish have reportedly fallen from the sky in Iran.

In a similar incident in 2020 in Golpayegan, also in Central Iran, another video posted on local social media also showed fish that reportedly had fallen from the sky.

And it’s not just fish that come down like manna from heaven in Iran. In what turned out to be a prank, another video showed eggplants falling from the sky in Tehran in 2020 that went viral and sparked widespread comment. The Iranian authorities subsequently detained five individuals in connection with the fabrication of the fake video.

While some commentators have cast doubt on the latest fish rain video, saying it may have been digitally manipulated, no official statements have been issued regarding the authenticity of the fish rain video thus far. The absence of an official response leaves room for speculation and given the extreme weather conditions resulting from the Climate Crisis, it is impossible to completely dismiss the incident as fake.

Adding to the chance that the fish were sucked up into the sky by some freak weather event is the fact that Yasouj is home to a large number of fish farms, with an annual output of approximately 20,000 tonnes a year.

Even more telling, Yasouj has already suffered from extreme weather incidents this year. The town was hit by heavy rainfall and thunderstorms earlier in April and  local authorities reported substantial losses incurred by these fish farms. Preliminary estimates indicated losses amounting to approximately IRR3 trillion ($4.5mn).