Latest news with #YoshihiroKaneko
Forbes
2 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
First-Ever Fault Rupture Captured On Video During Myanmar Earthquake
Video showing shaking of the surface and at 0:16 a sudden offset as part of the ground moves (for ... More the observer) from the left to the right. 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.
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
First video of an earthquake fault cracking has revealed another surprise
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A first-of-its-kind video showing the ground cracking during a major earthquake is even more remarkable than previously thought. It not only captures a ground motion never caught on video before but also shows the crack curving as it moves. This curvy movement has been inferred from the geological record and from "slickenlines" — scrape marks on the sides of faults — but it had never been seen in action, geophysicist Jesse Kearse, a postdoctoral researcher currently at Kyoto University in Japan, said in a statement. "Instead of things moving straight across the video screen, they moved along a curved path that has a convexity downwards, which instantly started bells ringing in my head," Kearse said, "because some of my previous research has been specifically on curvature of fault slip, but from the geological record." The video — captured by a security camera near Thazi, Myanmar — shows the ground rupturing during a magnitude 7.7 quake that hit the region on March 28. It shows the ground shaking, followed by a crack opening up. These ground ruptures are relatively common during big quakes, but they'd never been caught on video. Kearse said he watched the video with chills down his spine shortly after it was uploaded to YouTube. On his fifth or sixth viewing, he noticed that the crack was curvy. He and his colleague at Kyoto University, geophysicist Yoshihiro Kaneko, then analyzed the video more closely. They found that the crack curves sharply at first and then accelerates to a peak velocity of about 10.5 feet per second (3.2 meters per second) of movement, slipping a total of 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) in 1.3 seconds. After hitting its top velocity, the crack straightens and slows. The findings suggest that the curvature happens because stresses on the fault right at the ground surface are lower than the stresses on the fault deeper in the Earth. This creates an uneven pattern in how the fault moves. "The curvature holds important information about the dynamics of the rupture," Kearse said in an annotated video of the slip he posted on YouTube. Related: The San Andreas Fault: Facts about the crack in California's crust that could unleash the 'Big One' The differing stresses at the surface push the fault off its course, "and then it catches itself and does what it's supposed to do," Kearse said in the statement. RELATED STORIES —'This is a very big earthquake': The science behind Myanmar's magnitude 7.7 earthquake —20 largest earthquakes in history —Scientists find hidden mechanism that could explain how earthquakes 'ignite' The dynamics of these curvatures depend in part on which way the rupture travels, so an understanding of the curves can reveal clues about how past earthquakes unfolded and help scientists better predict future ground ruptures. The research was published today (July 18) in the journal The Seismic Record. Editor's Note: This article was updated at 8:20 p.m. EDT to note that the new research has now been published in The Seismic Record.
