First Video of a Fault Slip Sent Chills Down Researcher's Spine

A CCTV camera in Myanmar captured incredible footage during the country's March earthquake. A fault slip was caught on video for the first time and researchers say it will do a lot to improve their understanding of earthquakes, the Smithsonian reports. The video shows the ground shaking before it cracks and lurches sideways. "I saw this on YouTube an hour or two after it was uploaded, and it sent chills down my spine straight away," says Jesse Kearse, a geophysicist at Kyoto University. "It shows something that I think every earthquake scientist has been desperate to see, and it was just right there, so very exciting."

• He says that after five or six views, he noticed that "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, because some of my previous research has been specifically on curvature of fault slip, but from the geological record."

• Kearse and fellow Kyoto University geophysicist Yoshihiro Kaneko, co-authors of a study in the Seismic Record, says frame-by-frame analysis of the video determined the fault slipped about 8.2 feet for 1.3 seconds, with a peak velocity of about 10.5 feet per second.
• Kearse and Kaneko say being able to observe the slip in real-time was a breakthrough, since the duration of ruptures is tough to measure with distant instruments. "The total sideways movement recorded during this earthquake is typical of strike-slip ruptures, but the short duration of the fault slip is a major discovery," the researchers said in a statement.
• The video "reveals a pulse-like rupture—a concentrated burst of slip that propagates along the fault like a ripple travels down a rug when it's flicked from one end," Kearse writes at the Conversation. "Capturing this kind of detail is fundamental to understanding how earthquakes work, and it helps us better anticipate the ground shaking likely to occur in future large events."