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Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
First-of-its-kind video captures the terrifying moment the ground tore apart during major Myanmar earthquake
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A video showing the ground tearing apart in a major earthquake in Myanmar in March may be the first of its kind. The video captures a ground rupture, the ripping of Earth's crust all the way up to the surface, during a major earthquake. The magnitude 7.7 quake struck on March 28 at 12:50 p.m. local time and was felt as far away as Thailand. Nearly 5,500 people died. The video, posted on Facebook by Singaporean engineer Htin Aung, comes from GP Energy Myanmar's Thapyawa solar farm, located near the town of Thazi, according to Aung's post. The feed is centered on a concrete-and-metal gate, which shudders and slides open as the earth begins to move. About 14 seconds into the video, a crack opens across the driveway and yard outside the gate, with the ground literally pulling apart. "It's really kind of unsettling," said John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California Dornsife. Vidale told Live Science he knew of no other videos that show such a ground rupture. Rick Aster, a geophysicist at Colorado State University, concurred. "To my knowledge, this is the best video we have of a throughgoing surface rupture of a very large earthquake," Aster told Live Science. The Myanmar quake occurred on the Sagaing Fault between the Burma and Sunda tectonic plates, two minor tectonic plates. This fault slices through central Myanmar in a straight line, north to south. It's a transform fault, just like California's famous San Andreas, where the two plates move side by side against each other. The epicenter of the Myanmar quake, where the fault rupture started, was north of the location in the video, near the city of Mandalay. This rupture then propagated both north and south, cracking the ground all along the fault line. "The actual segment of the Earth that is slipping side to side goes from the surface down to maybe 20 or 30 kilometers [12 to 19 miles] depth," Aster said. Below that, the crust still moves, but the crust is more malleable and deforms rather than cracks. The shaking first seen in the video comes from the earthquake waves that speed out from the rupturing crack, Vidale said. Then, the rupture itself arrives. RELATED STORIES —The science behind Myanmar's magnitude 7.7 earthquake —Scientists find hidden mechanism that could explain how earthquakes 'ignite' —Huge earthquake 2,500 years ago rerouted the Ganges River, study suggests Seismologists get good measurements of such ruptures from seismic stations that use GPS to quantify even tiny movements of the crust. They also often do fieldwork to find evidence of ruptures after they happen, Aster said. "But we don't really understand the dynamics of what happened, exactly how things move," he said. The video might be useful for researchers who are trying to understand those unusual dynamics. "I have no doubt that seismologists will take a very close look at this," Aster said. "It will probably lead to some kind of a publication at some point, if the location and other details can be sorted out." Live Science reached out to Aung and to GP Energy Myanmar and will update this story with further details, if available.
Gizmodo
14-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Shocking Video Shows Earth Tearing Open During Myanmar's Earthquake in March
The camera points toward the gated entrance of a property and a long concrete driveway. About eight seconds in, the metal gate begins to vibrate, and then everything starts to shake. The gate flies open, a distant transmission tower buckles—and the whole right side of the scene slides forward. The footage dates back to March 28 of this year, when Myanmar experienced a magnitude 7.7 earthquake and several aftershocks that claimed over 3,600 victims and caused thousands of injuries. While the epicenter was near the city of Mandalay, people as far as Bangkok, Thailand's capital, felt the powerful shaking. The video captures a ground or surface rupture—when an earthquake tears the Earth right up to the surface—and it might be the first of its kind. On Sunday, Singaporean engineer Htin Aung posted the video on Facebook, where the channel 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive picked it up and republished it on YouTube. 'This is the first (and currently only) known instance of a fault line motion being captured on camera,' the YouTube post reads. According to Aung, the video was filmed at GP Energy Myanmar's Thapyawa solar farm. Our planet's surface is, simply put, made up of a number of moving slabs of earth called tectonic plates. While tectonic plates move very slowly—about as fast as your fingernails—when they push or slide past each other, the build-up and then sudden release of energy can cause devastating earthquakes. Because of this, regions on or close to where tectonic plates meet, called fault lines, are prone to earthquakes. Myanmar sits on the Sagaing Fault, which runs north-south through the center of the country at the boundary between the Sunda and Burma tectonic plates. The Sagaing Fault is a strike-slip fault, meaning the two tectonic plates slide horizontally against each other, as opposed to colliding head-on. This sort of motion is glaringly evident in the video from Sunday, in which the land on the right suddenly slides past the land on the left. 'To my knowledge, this is the best video we have of a throughgoing surface rupture of a very large earthquake,' Rick Aster, a geophysicist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. 'I have no doubt that seismologists will take a very close look at this,' he added. 'It will probably lead to some kind of a publication at some point.' The most infamous fault in the world is California's San Andreas fault, which is also a strike-slip boundary. For decades, scientists have warned that the San Andreas Fault is primed to trigger an earthquake so powerful it's earned a nickname: the 'Big One.' The simple truth, however, is that seismologists have not yet found a way to predict earthquakes with any sort of accuracy—and they might never do so. So the best that we and anyone living along a fault line can do is prepare for the day it comes.
