CCTV footage captures video of an earthquake fault in motion

(smithsonianmag.com)

466 points | by chrononaut 2 days ago

16 comments

  • 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!

    • widforss 2 days ago
      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.

      • brabel 2 days ago
        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!

        • apelapan 1 day ago
          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...

          • apelapan 1 day ago
            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.

            • brabel 1 day ago
              > 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...

          • xattt 2 days ago
            It sure would suck to lose half your property to the earth suddenly saying screw you.
            • MichaelZuo 2 days ago
              You could lose all your property, without compensation too, if your unlucky enough to have a big enough meteorite crash into it.
              • justincormack 1 day ago
                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.
                • mhb 1 day ago
                  Impressive. Here they give them money to rebuild in the same spot and hope for the best.
                • xattt 1 day ago
                  Can you not cash in on the meteorite?
                  • whycome 2 days ago
                    Or be native
                    • __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
                      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.
                      • gtowey 2 days ago
                        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!
                    • ipaddr 2 days ago
                      Natives signed treaties which are still respected today.
                      • yieldcrv 1 day ago
                        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
                      • mc32 2 days ago
                        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.
                        • immibis 2 days ago
                          Or Palestinian
                          • reliabilityguy 2 days ago
                            [flagged]
                            • immibis 1 day ago
                              Not sure what you're talking about here
                              • mhb 1 day ago
                                A clue is that history did not start in 1948.
                                • immibis 19 hours ago
                                  Can you say what you mean please?
                                  • mhb 17 hours ago
                                    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.

                                    • immibis 9 hours ago
                                      You're still beating around the bush. Can you say what you mean?
                                      • mhb 4 hours ago
                                        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"?
                          • gosub100 1 day ago
                            Can't even have an article about earthquakes without signalling your political tribe.
                    • bapak 2 days ago
                      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.

                    • rajnathani 9 hours ago
                      I was thinking more about in terms of GPS co-ordinates of Google Maps, etc.
                    • jagaerglad 2 days ago
                      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
                      • schoen 1 day ago
                        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!
                      • gnabgib 2 days ago
                        Discussion (81 points, 3 days ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44655128
                      • netbioserror 2 days ago
                        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.

                        • card_zero 2 days ago
                          in/s? Inches per second, or something else? One inch per second is the speed of an excited snail.
                          • netbioserror 2 days ago
                            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.

                            • Aachen 2 days ago
                              Must be inches per second because 1–10 of those is 0.025–0.25 m/s so that matches the parentheses
                              • csours 2 days ago
                                in soil, not air.
                          • v3ss0n 2 days ago
                            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?

                            • throw123xz 1 day ago
                              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.
                              • v3ss0n 6 hours ago
                                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.

                              • jofer 2 days ago
                                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.
                                • 1718627440 11 hours ago
                                  Maybe they should declare war on India until the stop that.
                                  • v3ss0n 4 hours ago
                                    We are already at fullscale revolution .. civil war ..
                              • varispeed 2 days ago
                                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.
                                • latexr 2 days ago
                                  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...

                                  • qntmfred 2 days ago
                                    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

                              • ranger_danger 2 days ago
                                Isn't this news several months old?
                                • schobi 2 days ago
                                  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
                                  • dang 1 day ago
                                    Link added to the top text. Thanks!
                                  • andrewflnr 2 days ago
                                    It seems like the analysis is the new part.
                                    • ofalkaed 2 days ago
                                      Quadrennial myopia.
                                    • moomoo11 2 days ago
                                      Silly question but how does this affect mapping software? Or is the movement insignificant that it doesn’t matter
                                    • KennyBlanken 2 days ago
                                      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.
                                      • kristopolous 2 days ago
                                        I know nothing so help me here. Why is this so rare? Aren't earthquakes, cameras, and monitoring of them pretty common?
                                        • irjustin 2 days ago
                                          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).

                                          • zellyn 2 days ago
                                            The California Memorial Stadium is built directly on a fault line, right?
                                            • rkomorn 2 days ago
                                              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.
                                              • irjustin 1 day ago
                                                Guess we'll get even better videos then.
                                          • apeters 1 day ago
                                            Makes me wonder how much energy the movement "released". Crazy.
                                            • johnnienaked 1 day ago
                                              Incredible
                                              • duxup 2 days ago
                                                • dang 1 day ago
                                                  Added to the top text. Thanks!
                                                • cibyr 2 days ago
                                                  So many autoplaying videos on the page, and none of them are the video that the article is about.
                                                  • DavidSJ 2 days ago
                                                    This is the original video, for those looking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77ubC4bcgRM
                                                    • praptak 2 days ago
                                                      PSA: it's easy to miss on the first watch because the big action happens in the background behind the gate.
                                                      • wizardforhire 2 days ago
                                                        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!
                                                        • nobrains 2 days ago
                                                          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.
                                                      • frauhaus 2 days ago
                                                        • dang 1 day ago
                                                          Link added to the top text. Thanks!
                                                        • dang 1 day ago
                                                          Link added to the top text. Thanks!
                                                        • fuenaksofu 2 days ago
                                                          Interesting. I see no other video. I use brave so maybe it blocked all the ads and noise.
                                                          • brabel 2 days ago
                                                            Firefox with AdBlocker Ultimate. Also saw no other videos, thankfully.
                                                            • throw123xz 2 days ago
                                                              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.

                                                              • brabel 1 day ago
                                                                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).
                                                          • Grimblewald 1 day ago
                                                            The article is aweful as well. How could they open with a "screenshot of the movement" with a straight face?
                                                            • falseprofit 2 days ago
                                                              It’s the first YouTube embed in the article.
                                                              • everdrive 2 days ago
                                                                javascript claims another victim. It's not good to run javascript by default.
                                                              • dzdt 2 days ago
                                                              • torium 1 day ago
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