CCTV footage captures video of an earthquake fault in motion
smithsonianmag.comOriginal: 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
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!
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.
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!
The official map of your property will not be exactly the same as the one on Lantmäteriet.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), Lantmäteriet 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 hävd". 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...
I had to go back and check regarding "Urminnes hävd" (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.
> Regarding your fence, 20 years is very far from enough to establish "urminnes hävd".
I was thinking of adverse possession, for which the time limits are 20 years or even 10 years in some cases:
https://jdc-definitions.wikibase.wiki/wiki/Adverse_Possessio...
Original Swedish text: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...
It sure would suck to lose half your property to the earth suddenly saying screw you.
You could lose all your property, without compensation too, if your unlucky enough to have a big enough meteorite crash into it.
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.
Impressive. Here they give them money to rebuild in the same spot and hope for the best.
Can you not cash in on the meteorite?
Or be native
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.
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!
If they work hard enough, perhaps they can buy some of it back. How civilized.
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Natives signed treaties which are still respected today.
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
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.
Or Palestinian
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Not sure what you're talking about here
A clue is that history did not start in 1948.
Can you say what you mean please?
You felt compelled to parade your ignorance by inserting this cheap shot about "Palestinians" into an unrelated discussion. What I mean by ignorance is joining the uninformed masses bleating about "genocide" and "colonialists". Presumably imagining that Jewish people arrived in Palestine de novo at some point in the 19th or 20th century and conquered the native Arab "Palestinians" there.
That's what I mean.
You're still beating around the bush. Can you say what you mean?
Since you're intent on not understanding the clear wording of what I mean, why don't you explain what you mean by "Or Palestinian"?
Can't even have an article about earthquakes without signalling your political tribe.
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.
> Area doesn't just disappear
Land area does in a subduction zone.
Although that land would have already been under water.
There are subduction zones outside oceanic plates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction#/media/File:Global_...
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.
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...
I was thinking more about in terms of GPS co-ordinates of Google Maps, etc.
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
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!
Discussion (81 points, 3 days ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44655128
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)
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.
in/s? Inches per second, or something else? One inch per second is the speed of an excited snail.
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.
Must be inches per second because 1–10 of those is 0.025–0.25 m/s so that matches the parentheses
in soil, not air.
Yikes, I see.
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?
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.
Rules? well .. we don't even have a real government now. The country is in revolution. Who writes the Rule is whoever who have more firepower or whoever who is closer to Junta. None of the rules works, everything can be bribed to junta.
None of the thing that rational government does works here anymore.
Whoever come inspect the buildings can be bribed with a few hundreds dollars.
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.
Maybe they should declare war on India until the stop that.
We are already at fullscale revolution .. civil war ..
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.
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...
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
Fascinating story, thanks. How many astronomers have had a play and an opera written about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Gentil
Isn't this news several months old?
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
Link added to the top text. Thanks!
It seems like the analysis is the new part.
Quadrennial myopia.
Silly question but how does this affect mapping software? Or is the movement insignificant that it doesn’t matter
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.
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-...
I know nothing so help me here. Why is this so rare? Aren't earthquakes, cameras, and monitoring of them pretty common?
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).
The California Memorial Stadium is built directly on a fault line, right?
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.
Guess we'll get even better videos then.
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.
Makes me wonder how much energy the movement "released". Crazy.
Incredible
https://youtu.be/dbEYe65eDdw?feature=shared
Added to the top text. Thanks!
So many autoplaying videos on the page, and none of them are the video that the article is about.
This is the original video, for those looking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM
PSA: it's easy to miss on the first watch because the big action happens in the background behind the gate.
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!
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.
And here’s the related paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/tsr/article/5/3/281/659...
Link added to the top text. Thanks!
Link added to the top text. Thanks!
Interesting. I see no other video. I use brave so maybe it blocked all the ads and noise.
Firefox with AdBlocker Ultimate. Also saw no other videos, thankfully.
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.
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).
The article is aweful as well. How could they open with a "screenshot of the movement" with a straight face?
It’s the first YouTube embed in the article.
javascript claims another victim. It's not good to run javascript by default.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959274
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