{"id":284300,"date":"2025-07-23T04:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T04:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/284300\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T04:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T04:36:12","slug":"first-ever-video-of-earthquake-ground-shift-continues-to-astonish-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/284300\/","title":{"rendered":"First-Ever Video of Earthquake Ground Shift Continues to Astonish Scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

A couple of months ago, PetaPixel reported on a remarkable security camera video that recorded the first-ever view of the Earth\u2019s surface shifting<\/a> along a major fault line during a massive earthquake. But further reserach has revealed it shows even more than that. <\/p>\n

Scientists continuing to study the surreal video footage have now found that it also provides the first direct visual evidence of a curved fault slip, an observation previously inferred only from geological features.<\/p>\n

The footage, recorded by a CCTV camera along the Sagaing Fault during the magnitude 7.7 earthquake on March 28, shows land on the fault\u2019s western side sliding northward. It was posted to YouTube shortly after the event and quickly caught the attention of geophysicist Jesse Kearse, a postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw this on YouTube an hour or two after it was uploaded, and it sent chills down my spine straight away,\u201d Kearse tells Phys.org<\/a>. \u201cIt shows something that I think every earthquake scientist has been desperate to see, and it was just right there, so very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the dramatic footage initially impressed researchers for simply capturing active fault slip, it was on subsequent viewings that Kearse noticed something more significant. <\/p>\n

\u201cInstead 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,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause some of my previous research has been specifically on curvature of fault slip, but from the geological record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curved motion along faults had been previously suggested based on features like slickenlines \u2014 scrape marks left by past seismic activity \u2014 but had never been visually documented in real time. Working with a colleague at Kyoto University, Kearse conducted a detailed analysis of the footage using pixel cross-correlation techniques. By tracking object movements frame by frame, they measured the rate and path of the rupture.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>(a) Map of Myanmar (inset) and the Myanmar earthquake. Red and blue colors show the coseismic surface displacement field derived from sentinel\u20102 images taken before and after, the earthquake from Van Wyk De Vries (2025). The locations of the CCTV camera and strong\u2010motion station NPW are shown. (b) Frame 1 of video (before rupture arrives) showing the field of view captured by the CCTV camera. The red dashed line shows the location of the Sagaing fault rupture. The offset path is obscured behind the gate structure in the foreground. (c) Planet labs satellite image with a 0.5 m resolution taken after the earthquake (5 April 2025). Features observable in panel (d) are labeled. The colorized area corresponds to the field of view of the video frame in panel (b). f1\u2013f3 denote fence posts located on the east side of the fault used to calibrate coseismic displacements. r1, r2, sp, and pole are objects that are displaced by fault motion. The white cross labeled \u201ctarget\u201d shows the location of features tracked using image cross correlation. (d) Enlarged subset of the video frame showing the locations of the objects in pixel coordinates. <\/p>\n

Their analysis found that the fault slipped 2.5 meters (about 8.2 feet) over 1.3 seconds, reaching a peak velocity of 3.2 meters per second (10.5 feet per second). The slip began with a sharp curve before straightening as it decelerated. This behavior suggests that dynamic stresses near the Earth\u2019s surface are lower than those deeper in the crust, influencing the rupture\u2019s path.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe curvature holds important information about the dynamics of the rupture,\u201d Kearse adds. The findings suggest that these transient stresses initially deflect the rupture before it stabilizes. \u201cThese transient stresses push the fault off its intended course initially, and then it catches itself and does what it\u2019s supposed to do, after that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The research was published<\/a> on July 18 in The Seismic Record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple of months ago, PetaPixel reported on a remarkable security camera video that recorded the first-ever view…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[106537,18599,35330,106538,95889,2343,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-284300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-caughtoncamera","9":"tag-cctv","10":"tag-earthquake","11":"tag-faultline","12":"tag-myanmar","13":"tag-research","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114900696019726485","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}