The magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck Myanmar and Thailand on March 28 has crossed a bittersweet milestone. As seen in a new video, the quake involved a strike-slip fault in the town of Thazi, where a fault rupture was caught on film for the first time.
SagaingEarthquakeArchive2025, a YouTube channel that shares smartphone and surveillance camera footage of earthquakes around Southeast Asia, published the video on May 11. The video appears to come from a security camera attached to the exterior of a prefabricated building. After the first few seconds, the building begins to tremble, and the gate at the foot of the driveway starts to slide on its track. A large crack appears in the driveway as tropical plants sway. Then, in the background, an almost unfathomable shift: The ground slips forward by what appears to be several feet.
According to Fumihiko Ikegami, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Japan, the strike-slip shift is the “first fault movement ever filmed.”
While geologists and seismologists have studied the movement of Earth’s faults for more than a century, they’ve historically worked with images and measurements of faults captured before and after their shifts—not footage of the movements themselves. For the first time, a video of the shift could help researchers understand how and when fault slips occur alongside other earthquake phenomena, like shaking and rolling.
“In 25 years (since beginning of undergrad), I have only ever seen before and after pictures resulting from fault rupture,” Reddit user u/DoctorSeis, a seismologist who has long contributed to forum discussions about earthquakes, said in response to the surveillance camera footage. “These ruptures are super common around strike-slip faults (like San Andreas). Never have I seen [a] rupture like this, this close, this big, in action. It’s incredible.”
Credit: Magdalena Chodownik/Getty Images News
Despite the video’s value to geoscience, the earthquake itself—which has been reported as both M7.7 and a M7.9 by various geoscience organizations—is invariably considered one of the most devastating in Myanmar’s history. Regional news outlets reported more than 4,900 fatalities, 6,000 injuries, and 760 missing persons; the destruction of over 12,000 homes, 1,000 government buildings, and 50 health centers has also launched the country into a humanitarian crisis.