First-Ever Fault Rupture Captured On Video During Myanmar Earthquake
A video uploaded just a few days after a powerful earthquake hit Myanmar on March 28, 2025, quickly captured attention of the geological community, as it shows the exact moment the ground ruptures along a fault.
The video comes from a CCTV security camera recording along the trace of Myanmar's Sagaing Fault, which ruptured in a magnitude 7.7 earthquake. The camera was placed about 20 meters to the east of the fault and was 120 kilometers away from the earthquake's center.
When geophysicist Jesse Kearse and his colleague Yoshihiro Kaneko at Kyoto University analyzed the video more carefully, they noted that the video not only shows a fault in motion as never seen before — shaking followed by a visible slide of the ground — but reveled the dynamics of fault slip.
'I saw this on YouTube an hour or two after it was uploaded, and it sent chills down my spine straight away,' Kearse recalls. 'It shows something that I think every earthquake scientist has been desperate to see, and it was just right there, so very exciting.'
Geological clues, like curved scrape marks on fault planes, already suggested that blocks of rock moving past each other during faulting rotate slightly , but until now there has been no visual proof for this geomechanical behavior.
'Instead of things moving straight across the video screen, they moved along a curved path that has a convexity downwards,' Kearse explains.
The researchers decided to track the movement of objects in the video by pixel cross correlation, frame by frame. The analysis helped them measure the rate and direction of fault motion during the earthquake.
They conclude that the fault slipped 2.5 meters for roughly 1.3 seconds, at a peak velocity of about 3.2 meters per second. This shows that the earthquake was pulse-like, which is a major discovery and confirms previous inferences made from seismic waveforms of other earthquakes. In addition, even if most of the fault motion is vertical (a classic strike-slip fault), the slip curves at first, then remains linear as the slip slows down. The pattern fits with what earthquake scientists had previously proposed, as the ground breaks first at the weakest point (in this case the surface) and then the rupturing fault follows.
The video confirmation can help researchers create better dynamic models of how faults rupture and how the energy of an earthquake spreads from its point of origin, Kearse and Kaneko conclude.
The full study, "Curved Fault Slip Captured by CCTV Video During the 2025 Mw 7.7 Myanmar Earthquake," was published in the journal The Seismic Record and can be found online here.
Additional material and interviews provided by the Seismological Society of America.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Earthquake strikes one of UK's most popular hiking spots
The UK has been hit by an earthquake amid a wave of seismic activity across the country over recent weeks. A 3.1 magnitude earthquake hit Inchlaggan in the Scottish Highlands on Friday afternoon, the British Geological Survey (BGS) has said. The earthquake struck a depth of 8 kilometres and its impact spanned 24 kilometres, the survey's website shows. There have been more than 100 earthquakes recorded in the UK so far this year with at least nine detected in just one week in July. The past month has seen 18 small earthquakes in and around the British isles, ranging in magnitude from 0.2 to 3.2 on the Richter scale. In one week between 21 July and 27 July, nine earthquakes were recorded by the BGS. This included two 3.2-magnitude earthquakes in the southern North Sea. On 2 July a 2.5-magnitude earthquake was recorded in Knuckles, a small village in Powys, Wales, with a population of around 350. The quake struck 13 kilometres under the ground. Shortly after midnight on Thursday 24 July, two earthquakes struck within just nine minutes of each other in Argyll and Bute, western Scotland. These were recorded at 1.3 and 0.8 respectively. The UK is hit by hundreds of earthquakes every year, experts revealed to The Independent in 2023, as they say the country is 'riddled' with fault lines. The BGS said that as many as 300 earthquakes impact the UK each year, with around a tenth of those being large enough to be felt by people near the epicentre, while the others are detected by sensitive instruments. Sergei Lebedev, Professor of Geophysics at the University of Cambridge, said that a tremor of a magnitude over three is 'fairly common'. He said: 'Above three is not a microearthquake - which are very common - and is felt and can cause minor damage so, of course, is a concern. In fact, earthquakes, in general, are not extraordinary events in this country, Mr Hawthorn added, explaining: 'The fault map of the UK looks insane - we're just riddled with plains of weakness. Geologically speaking, the UK has four or five different land masses, all of which have been squeezed together over many years - so there are faults between the land masses and then there are multiple faults on the land masses themselves.'
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Google Has Quietly Been Detecting Earthquakes by Sensing Rumbling in Android Phones For Years
Google has for years been harnessing the power of its Android smartphones to detect and measure tens of thousands of earthquakes. In a new paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the search giant described how they used motion sensors from its two billion-strong network of phones running Android between the years 2021 and 2024 to detect and alert quakes to users in almost 100 countries around the world. Known as "Android Earthquake Alerts" (AEA), this early warning system has uses the smartphones' accelerometers to detect telltale vibrations as they happen and inform residents of quakes in their areas. With its two-tiered severity levels — the weaker "be aware alert" for lower-magnitude quakes that sends typical push notifications, and the more pressing "take action alert" for moderate or extreme shakes that issues a loud beeping alarm that overrides "Do Not Disturb" settings — Google boasts that it has warned of more than 11,000 quakes. While such a system has invariably saved lives, however, AEA is far from flawless. In the case of Turkey's deadly quakes in 2023 that claimed more than 55,000 lives and injured over 100,000 people, the company now admits that it erroneously sent its lower-level notifications to hundreds of thousands of people — a massive failure during one of the deadliest natural disasters in recent history. Both in the Science paper and in a statement to BBC, Google admitted that it only sent 469 "Take Action" alerts during the first of the two earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023, and instead mass-notified half a million people with the "Be Aware" version, the less severe of the two warnings. Because the first earthquake occurred at around 4:15 in the morning, that quieter warning likely went unseen by people who were asleep and had their phones silenced. That discrepancy appears to be the result of bad seismic readings from the phones' sensors. Initially, the system's algorithms estimated that the first quake was between a 4.5 and 4.9 on the moment magnitude scale (MMS), but it was actually a far more serious 7.8. During the second quake, the AEA also underestimated the magnitude, sending only 8,158 "Take Action" alarms and almost four million "Be Aware" alerts. (That shoddy algorithm, the company says, has since been updated.) Until now, Google deflected blame for the system's failure, even after the BBC investigated the AEA in the aftermath of the quakes and found it to be severely lacking. Though this sort of admission is better late than never, it's still concerning that Google took more than two years to admit the system's failures during the Turkey earthquakes. With so many people relying on the tech monolith for life-saving alerts, taking accountability for the AEA's failures is paramount — and that accountability should have been much swifter. More on disasters: Extreme Heat Is Killing Unfathomable Numbers of People Worldwide Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
7 hours ago
- Fox News
Common sweetener could hold untapped potential to fight aggressive cancer, study finds
A household sweetener could hold the potential to create an anti-cancer treatment. New research from Hiroshima University in Japan revealed that stevia leaf extract could help fight pancreatic cancer cells. The leaves of the stevia plant (Stevia rebaudiana) are used to make stevia extract, a naturally sweet substance commonly used as a sugar substitute. The study, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, investigated the anti-cancer properties of stevia leaf extract when it is fermented with a certain strain of bacteria. In laboratory research, the fermented extract exhibited "significantly enhanced antioxidant activity and cytotoxicity" against pancreatic cancer cells, the researchers revealed. This led them to believe that this substance could serve as a "promising candidate for pancreatic cancer treatment." Paul E. Oberstein, M.D., medical oncologist and assistant director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center at NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, shared his thoughts in an interview with Fox News Digital. "This is an interesting study because it evaluated something derived from a natural plant (stevia) and showed that it may have utility in stopping cancer cells from growing in the laboratory," he said. "As the authors point out, the actual stevia plant does not seem to have any benefit for stopping cancer, so they had to use a chemical process to change the plant and make it stronger with a fermentation process." "This is the process of how we discover new treatments – some of which turn out to be absolute game-changers." Oberstein recommended approaching this with caution, as it is unknown whether altering the plant will lead to side effects or toxicity. The study was not performed on humans, so there is "still a lot that's unknown about whether this will help patients," the oncologist added. As stevia extract alone does not have an impact on cancer cells, Oberstein said these findings most likely will not lead to any immediate changes in treatment plans. "The study suggests that if the stevia can be changed in the lab, it may have an impact, so hopefully they will further test this and determine whether this effect happens when tested in people and if it doesn't cause new side effects," he added. "I hope the researchers keep testing this in various formats and in people." Dr. Kristen Arnold, a surgical oncologist and pancreatic cancer specialist at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute, reacted to these study findings in a separate interview with Fox News Digital. "Pancreatic cancer is a very aggressive malignancy," she said. "And we know that even with the most aggressive of therapies, unfortunately, our outcomes are not good." "As a pancreatic cancer community, we spend a lot of time and there's a lot of ongoing effort into trying to find better modalities to treat this disease." Although more research is needed to confirm these preliminary findings, Arnold said she is encouraged by the study. "I think the data's very early to know if it's ultimately going to be a game-changer, but it's very exciting to know that we're finding some positive pre-clinical data," she said. "This is the process of how we discover new treatments – some of which turn out to be absolute game-changers and make dramatic changes in the lives of our patients." "Not all of it pans out, but it's a process of discovery," Arnold added. For those with pancreatic cancer, Arnold recommends seeking out appropriate clinical trial opportunities as new science develops. "The clinical trials are ultimately what determine how we treat patients on a day-to-day basis," she added. Fox News Digital reached out to the study authors for comment.
