Scientists gobsmacked by never-seen footage of earth rupturing during Myanmar quake

When you watch the video below, don't get distracted by the cracking concrete or the metal gate rocking back and forth. Keep your eyes focused on the right side of the screen, where you will see an astonishing sight — one that earthquake scientists say has never been caught on camera before. 

The video was captured by a surveillance camera on March 28, when a violent earthquake struck the southeast Asian country of Myanmar — causing widespread damage as far away as Bangkok in neighbouring Thailand, and killing some 3,700 people, according to Myanmar's ruling military junta. 

The footage shows the moment the 7.7 magnitude quake caused the land on one side to thrust forward with a powerful jolt, as a rupture ripped opened the earth for 460 kilometres along the Sagaing Fault.

"My jaw hit the floor," said Wendy Bohon, an earthquake geologist and science communication specialist in Sacramento, Calif., when she saw it. 

Satellite imagery and other data had already helped scientists determine the extent of the rupture and approximately how much the earth moved. But seeing such a dramatic shift of the landscape in action is a first for scientists like Bohon, and may prove to be an invaluable tool in understanding the type of earthquake that ravaged Myanmar.

"We have computer models of it. We have laboratory models of it. But all of those are far less complex than the actual natural system. So to see it actually happening was mind-blowing," she told CBC News. 

"I keep going back and watching it," said geologist Judith Hubbard, an assistant professor at Cornell University's department of Earth and atmospheric sciences.

"It's really kind of staggering to see a fault slide in real time, especially for someone like me, who has spent years studying these things, but always from more remote kinds of data, like offsets after the fact or data recorded by sensors," she said in an email interview. 

The Sagaing Fault runs some 1,400 kilometres, between the Indian and Eurasian plates, right through Myanmar and into the Andaman Sea. It's a strike-slip fault, meaning that when an earthquake happens, the land mass on one side of the fault slides past the other. 

Researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used satellite and radar data to determine that the earthquake caused a horizontal displacement up to six metres in some locations along the fault. The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan made similar observations. 

Scientists like Hubbard say there is "compelling evidence" it was a supershear earthquake. 

That's when the speed of the rupture, which is generally slower-moving, travels faster than seismic waves that the earthquake produces, which can travel up to six kilometres per second. 

The video appeared May 11 on a YouTube channel called 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive, which has been curating social media videos and security camera footage since the quake struck. 

According to a Facebook post linked in the caption, the video was from a camera at a power facility in Tha Phay Wa. That's in the township of Thazi, some 110 kilometres south of the city of Mandalay, and close to the epicentre of the quake and its 6.7 magnitude aftershock.