CCTV footage captures the first-ever video of an earthquake fault in motion

dzdt

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959274

jxntb73

That's no FAULT of his own.

blinding-streak

How does property/real estate ownership work in this case? Seeing the land shift so clearly by several feet makes me wonder.

What was on your property is now on my property!

widforss

By the discussions I've had with surveyors in my country (Sweden), any coordinate descriptions of properties are deferred to the physical markers in the ground (cairns for older property, metal stakes for newer ones). This would only be an issue in properties that have never been surveyed (and marked) at all.

Straight borders might become crooked if they cross the crack though.

xattt

It sure would suck to lose half your property to the earth suddenly saying screw you.

MichaelZuo

You could lose all your property, without compensation too, if your unlucky enough to have a big enough meteorite crash into it.

cibyr

So many autoplaying videos on the page, and none of them are the video that the article is about.

fuenaksofu

Interesting. I see no other video. I use brave so maybe it blocked all the ads and noise.

DavidSJ

This is the original video, for those looking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM

praptak

PSA: it's easy to miss on the first watch because the big action happens in the background behind the gate.

wizardforhire

Thanks, first watch all I saw was the driveway crack appear. Second pass could be mistaken for a parallax effect as the entire background shifts forward!

frauhaus

And here’s the related paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/tsr/article/5/3/281/659...

falseprofit

It’s the first YouTube embed in the article.

gnabgib

Discussion (81 points, 3 days ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44655128

v3ss0n

4.x l to 5.x earthquakes are still happening a few times a week and the area couldn't recover from disaster. last week, one 4 stories building next to my friend house collapsed,near Mandalay.

Does that mean Myanmar is now an active zone?

ranger_danger

Isn't this news several months old?

schobi

A previous discussion of the M7.7 quake in Burma/Myanmar from March 28, 2025 was provided by Sean Wilsey. He explained the earthquake and context and discussed the CCTV footage around 6:30 https://youtu.be/CfKFK4-HNmk

ofalkaed

Quadrennial myopia.

andrewflnr

It seems like the analysis is the new part.

netbioserror

Terrifying. I program automated vibration analysis for blasting, and a very powerful explosive blast will feature particle velocities (the direct corollary for power) in the single-digit in/s range (~0.02-0.13 m/s) . This peak particle velocity is 20-150x higher than the peaks we see from the most powerful blasts we measure, if they're at all qualitatively comparable.

And of course, the earthquake energy source is many magnitudes larger and much, much further away, deep in the crust, with the wavefront already having passed through miles of solid rock. We measure blasts from at most a few hundred meters away.

card_zero

in/s? Inches per second, or something else? One inch per second is the speed of an excited snail.

Aachen

Must be inches per second because 1–10 of those is 0.025–0.25 m/s so that matches the parentheses

csours

in soil, not air.

card_zero

Yikes, I see.

moomoo11

Silly question but how does this affect mapping software? Or is the movement insignificant that it doesn’t matter

nullhole

It's tracked by some national agencies, for example NZ has a deformation model. This link has a summary & links to some lectures about the deformation model: https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...

Metres of movement would definitely be significant for a lot of mapping use cases. This is why the time component of any coordinate measurement is important, both due to earthquakes as well as plain old plate motion.

praptak

It does but it's just one of many factors that make maps diverge from the ground truth:

https://nautil.us/what-happens-to-google-maps-when-tectonic-...

kristopolous

I know nothing so help me here. Why is this so rare? Aren't earthquakes, cameras, and monitoring of them pretty common?

irjustin

Videos of earthquakes are common enough.

It's the video of the fault line itself fracturing that's so interesting.

We know where the fault lines are, so we generally avoid building anything major near them because... well earthquakes. Hence no other videos of actual fault line fractures (vs general street ones).

varispeed

It is remarkable how widespread of CCTV has helped in that field. Imagine being a scientist and never actually experience or see the earthquake you are into researching. That be like going to place where they are common and then sit a year or so and anticipating. Is it coming? Should be any time soon? Then when it happens you are in the toilet and have seen nothing apart from painting falling off the wall.

latexr

How about waiting over a decade and be getting a drink when it happens? Then waiting another decade and a technical problem preventing it from having been recorded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment#Universi...