[HN Gopher] CCTV footage captures video of an earthquake fault i...
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CCTV footage captures video of an earthquake fault in motion
Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM Paper:
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/tsr/article/5/3/281/659...
Analyses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbEYe65eDdw,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKFK4-HNmk
Author : chrononaut
Score : 395 points
Date : 2025-07-26 02:54 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Isn't this news several months old?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It seems like the analysis is the new part.
| schobi wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| Link added to the top text. Thanks!
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Quadrennial myopia.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (81 points, 3 days ago, 13 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44655128
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Earthquake Causes 2.5-Meter Ground Slip in First-Ever
| Footage_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44655128 - July
| 2025 (18 comments)
|
| _First fault rupture ever filmed [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44305403 - June 2025 (1
| comment)
|
| _First fault movement ever filmed. M7.9 surface rupture near
| Thazi, Myanmar [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959274 - May 2025 (3
| comments)
| netbioserror wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| in/s? Inches per second, or something else? One inch per second
| is the speed of an excited snail.
| csours wrote:
| in soil, not air.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yikes, I see.
| Aachen wrote:
| Must be inches per second because 1-10 of those is 0.025-0.25
| m/s so that matches the parentheses
| netbioserror wrote:
| This is the solid particles in the ground moving in place. As
| the wave passes through, any given volume of ground is
| displaced somewhat. In a balanced low-intensity wave, the
| soil or rock gets jostled around a bit. In a high-intensity
| balanced wave, the ground is yanked back and forth,
| potentially damaging foundations or buildings above the
| foundation. Particles will be displaced, but not permanently,
| with a net of 0.
|
| In an unbalanced wave, the earth is permanently displaced in
| a particular direction. We can measure that net displacement
| in a particular direction using an anti-derivative if the
| total average velocity is nonzero (if we included negative
| velocities around a given axis). Earthquakes, of course, tend
| to have nonzero net displacement, and thus an extremely
| biased velocity waveform along a particular axis.
|
| So in fact, the soil beneath you vibrating back and forth at
| 1 to 5 inches per second is not fun. At 118 inches per
| second? Catastrophe.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I know nothing so help me here. Why is this so rare? Aren't
| earthquakes, cameras, and monitoring of them pretty common?
| irjustin wrote:
| 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).
| zellyn wrote:
| The California Memorial Stadium is built directly on a fault
| line, right?
| rkomorn wrote:
| Yep. Had a pretty significant renovation/retrofit in
| 2010-2012 ago to address the fact that the fault had (among
| other things) caused some walls to start coming apart.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Silly question but how does this affect mapping software? Or is
| the movement insignificant that it doesn't matter
| praptak wrote:
| 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-...
| nullhole wrote:
| 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.
| cibyr wrote:
| So many autoplaying videos on the page, and none of them are the
| video that the article is about.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| This is the original video, for those looking:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM
| praptak wrote:
| PSA: it's easy to miss on the first watch because the big
| action happens in the background behind the gate.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| 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!
| nobrains wrote:
| So, I recommend seeing it in 3 passes. 1st pass, see the
| right 1/3rd area of the video. It shows the 2 sides
| moving. Then see the middle 1/3rd area of the video. It
| shows both the movement and the rupture in the ground.
| Then see the left 1/3rd area of the video. It shows the
| rupture on the ground clearly.
| frauhaus wrote:
| And here's the related paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.or
| g/ssa/tsr/article/5/3/281/659...
| dang wrote:
| Link added to the top text. Thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Link added to the top text. Thanks!
| falseprofit wrote:
| It's the first YouTube embed in the article.
| fuenaksofu wrote:
| Interesting. I see no other video. I use brave so maybe it
| blocked all the ads and noise.
| brabel wrote:
| Firefox with AdBlocker Ultimate. Also saw no other videos,
| thankfully.
| throw123xz wrote:
| OT, but the company behind that extension seems to be a bit
| shady.
|
| uBlock Origin is open source, very efficient, and seems to
| be well regarded around these parts.
| brabel wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know. I always confuse the two and
| ended up with the "wrong one" I guess.... though they
| haven't given me any trouble or annoyances so far (they
| just open a page where I can volunteer to make a payment
| every now and then, but it's easy enough to close the tab
| and ignore it).
| everdrive wrote:
| javascript claims another victim. It's not good to run
| javascript by default.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| 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?
| jofer wrote:
| It's always been active. The Sagaing fault is a plate boundary.
| You're seeing the "side" of the Indian subcontinent slamming
| northward into the Eurasian plate.
| throw123xz wrote:
| The rules for building in these areas should be way more strict
| than they are. A 4.x earthquake in Japan is just another normal
| day for them.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| qntmfred wrote:
| also reminds me of:
|
| in 1663 Scottish mathematician James Gregory figured out that
| you could calculate the distance between the Earth and the
| Sun by making measurements during the transit of Mercury or
| Venus across the Sun. You get much more accurate results with
| Venus, but the next transit of Venus wasn't predicted to be
| until 1761 and 1769.
|
| In 1760 French mathematician Guillaume Le Gentil sailed from
| France to India to make observations of the transit, but due
| to weather and delays, he was still on the ship when summer
| 1761 arrived and he missed his chance to make his
| measurements. So he stayed in India for another 8 years. And
| then on the day of the 1769 transit, it was cloudy and he
| missed it again. So he went back to France where he found out
| he had long ago been declared dead, his possessions had been
| seized and his wife had married somebody else.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDSM-CtYzxY&t=5m29s
| macintux wrote:
| Fascinating story, thanks. How many astronomers have had a
| play and an opera written about them?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Gentil
| blinding-streak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It sure would suck to lose half your property to the earth
| suddenly saying screw you.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You could lose all your property, without compensation too,
| if your unlucky enough to have a big enough meteorite crash
| into it.
| whycome wrote:
| Or be native
| mc32 wrote:
| Or lose a war, or bet your property or not pay taxes or
| eminent domain... but I guess nomads never had a
| immovable property claim.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The natives lost something, to be sure, but I'm not sure
| it was property. Property is created when you kick
| everyone else out. I assume that's the rationale behind
| "property is theft," it used to be everybody's and now
| it's yours.
| gtowey wrote:
| You're correct. They didn't lose property as they had no
| legal concept of ownership. Instead they lost their
| homes, their culture, and their lives. How lucky for
| them!
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If they work hard enough, perhaps they can buy some of it
| back. How civilized.
| immibis wrote:
| Or Palestinian
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| Or any other nation during any of the conflicts. You are
| aware that Arabs were not the only ones who lost their
| property, Jews lost theirs too.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Natives signed treaties which are still respected today.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The level of respect is per treaty, a blanket statement
| cant be corroborated as many are not respected or dont
| have consensus amongst the affected people of being
| respected
| gosub100 wrote:
| Can't even have an article about earthquakes without
| signalling your political tribe.
| justincormack wrote:
| People lose property to coastal erosion all the time.
| Here there is a scheme to give some people replacement
| land further inland I think in some areas.
| mhb wrote:
| Impressive. Here they give them money to rebuild in the
| same spot and hope for the best.
| xattt wrote:
| Can you not cash in on the meteorite?
| brabel wrote:
| I am also in Sweden, and learned recently that a large part
| of my property seems to actually belong to the neighbour
| according to the online map! But there is a page in the
| relevant authority's website which clarifies that the online
| map can be 10s of meters off (in Swedish):
| https://www.lantmateriet.se/sv/kartor/vara-
| karttjanster/Visa...
|
| There, it even explains some history and methodology for
| defining the borders. Mostly, they are defined by physical
| markers that hopefully the original surveryors left on the
| ground. I found a couple around my property (which is on
| hills so it's likely difficult to mark properly on a map from
| above) and it seems the borders are actually almost correct.
| As my fences have been up for over 20 years in the same
| location, I believe they also count now as de-facto borders
| now!
| apelapan wrote:
| The official map of your property will not be exactly the
| same as the one on Lantmateriet.se.
|
| In more densely populated areas, there will be a local
| coordinate system, where each property is defined in terms
| of the neighbouring ones. This also applies to newly formed
| properties in old areas.
|
| The property borders on digital maps are machine
| approximations of the mapping from the local coordinate
| system onto an absolute global coordinate system. This
| mapping can never be perfect, and it is often much less
| perfect than it could have been.
|
| When the physical markers are missing or suspected of
| having moved from their original location (happens all the
| time for all sorts of reasons), Lantmateriet will review
| the original documents of your and any number of
| neighbouring properties and deduce where the markers ought
| to be.
|
| Regarding your fence, 20 years is very far from enough to
| establish "urminnes havd". I suggest you wait another 100
| years before you start assuming that they could act as
| facts on the ground in a property disputes! :-) And even
| then I wouldn't bet on it, unless the national archives are
| all destroyed...
| apelapan wrote:
| I had to go back and check regarding "Urminnes havd"
| (ancient custom). The creation of new instances of this
| for property rights was blocked back in 1970.
|
| You can still use it, but then you must prove that the
| property right was an established ancient custom already
| before 1970. Anything that started after that will never
| qualify, no matter how much time passes.
| bapak wrote:
| Area doesn't just disappear. I suppose that depending on what's
| _on_ the land, your area might have a few more potatoes from
| your northern neighbors and fewer carrots you generously gifted
| to your southern neighbors.
|
| You could alternatively just deal with your new jagged plot.
|
| Worst case scenario, you're now the owner of the new Turkish
| Canyon.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| I don't think there's a universally accepted solution but in
| California it would be up to the state to figure it out. It
| would be a great time to be a Real Estate lawyer after a
| quake there.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| California has the Cullen Earthquake Act.
|
| Essentially one affected party comes up with a proposed
| solution, files paperwork with the court, and then all the
| rest of the affected parties get together (under court
| supervision) to make whatever changes are necessary until
| the solution is fair. If the court agrees that it is a fair
| solution, it becomes final.
|
| https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-
| ccp/part-2/titl...
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Area doesn't just disappear
|
| _Land_ area does in a subduction zone.
| uolmir wrote:
| Although that land would have already been under water.
| dehrmann wrote:
| There are subduction zones outside oceanic plates:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction#/media/File:Glob
| al_...
| dzdt wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959274
| duxup wrote:
| https://youtu.be/dbEYe65eDdw?feature=shared
| dang wrote:
| Added to the top text. Thanks!
| jagaerglad wrote:
| in a sense it's mind blowing that we had images of stars being
| born, black holes, cells dividing etc before earthquake faults in
| motion. Like how the process of how they happen have only been
| inferred until now
| schoen wrote:
| This reminds me of the idea that we know more about some
| aspects of space than about the ocean. At least, more people
| have been to the moon than to the deepest point of the ocean!
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The entire camera clearly dips and then rises during the fault
| slide. It's not the fault moving in a curved path, it's the
| camera dipping and rising. You can clearly see that just by
| placing your finger or mouse cursor on any feature in the video.
| apeters wrote:
| Makes me wonder how much energy the movement "released". Crazy.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| Incredible
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