The camera points toward the gated entrance of a property and a long concrete driveway. About eight seconds in, the metal gate begins to vibrate, and then everything starts to shake. The gate flies open, a distant transmission tower buckles—and the whole right side of the scene slides forward.
The footage dates back to March 28 of this year, when Myanmar experienced a magnitude 7.7 earthquake and several aftershocks that claimed over 3,600 victims and caused thousands of injuries. While the epicenter was near the city of Mandalay, people as far as Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, felt the powerful shaking. The video captures a ground or surface rupture—when an earthquake tears the Earth right up to the surface—and it might be the first of its kind.
On Sunday, Singaporean engineer Htin Aung posted the video on Facebook, where the channel 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive picked it up and republished it on YouTube. “This is the first (and currently only) known instance of a fault line motion being captured on camera,” the YouTube post reads. According to Aung, the video was filmed at GP Energy Myanmar’s Thapyawa solar farm.
Our planet’s surface is, simply put, made up of a number of moving slabs of earth called tectonic plates. While tectonic plates move very slowly—about as fast as your fingernails—when they push or slide past each other, the build-up and then sudden release of energy can cause devastating earthquakes. Because of this, regions on or close to where tectonic plates meet, called fault lines, are prone to earthquakes. Myanmar sits on the Sagaing Fault, which runs north-south through the center of the country at the boundary between the Sunda and Burma tectonic plates.
The Sagaing Fault is a strike-slip fault, meaning the two tectonic plates slide horizontally against each other, as opposed to colliding head-on. This sort of motion is glaringly evident in the video from Sunday, in which the land on the right suddenly slides past the land on the left.
“To my knowledge, this is the best video we have of a throughgoing surface rupture of a very large earthquake,” Rick Aster, a geophysicist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. “I have no doubt that seismologists will take a very close look at this,” he added. “It will probably lead to some kind of a publication at some point.”
The most infamous fault in the world is California’s San Andreas fault, which is also a strike-slip boundary. For decades, scientists have warned that the San Andreas Fault is primed to trigger an earthquake so powerful it’s earned a nickname: the “Big One.” The simple truth, however, is that seismologists have not yet found a way to predict earthquakes with any sort of accuracy—and they might never do so. So the best that we and anyone living along a fault line can do is prepare for the day it comes.
