Now-famous CCTV footage from March confirms faulting dynamics that researchers could previously only infer.
In May, we reported on a first-of-its-kind video that captured surface rupture during Myanmar’s devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake. While the YouTube video now has 1.6 million views, two geophysicists spotted something many people probably didn’t notice.
The video seems like a gift that just keeps on giving. As the Kyoto University scientists explain in a study published last month in The Seismic Record, it also includes the first direct visual evidence of pulse-like rupturing and a curved fault slip. This means the two sides of the strike-slip fault didn’t just slip horizontally past each other—the slip path also dipped downward. While scientists have previously inferred both features from seismic data and post-earthquake observations and seismic data, the video provides direct visual evidence.
“Our results provide the first direct visual evidence of curved coseismic fault slip, bridging a critical gap among seismological observations, geological data, and theoretical models,” the researchers wrote in the study.
