Terrifying footage has emerged from March’s Myanmar earthquake showing the ground literally sliding either side of two tectonic plates.
The astonishing video clip, originally uploaded to Facebook, was captured by a surveillance camera just south of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city.
Initially, the clip – captured at 12:46pm local time on March 28 – looks like unremarkable security footage from a private property.
But about 10 seconds in, the point-of-view begins to shake up and down, plants flap wildly and the gate starts sliding back and forth.
Then, at about 14 seconds, the entire driveway starts to move forward relative to the ground beyond, like some kind of horrible fairground ride.
Wendy Bohon, an earthquake geologist and science communicator in California, said her ‘jaw hit the floor’ when she saw the footage from along the fault line.
‘We have computer models of it, we have laboratory models of it, but all of those are far less complex than the actual natural system,’ she told CBS News.
‘So to see it actually happening was mind-blowing.’
Like some kind of fairground ride, the entire property appears to shift forward as cracks appear in the ground
An account called 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive found the video on Facebook and uploaded it to their YouTube page
John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California Dornsife, said he knows of no other video showing a so-called ‘ground rupture’.
‘It’s really kind of unsettling,’ Professor Vidale told Live Science.
The footage was captured by a security camera at GP Energy Myanmar’s Tha Pyay Wa solar energy facility, just south of Mandalay.
An account called 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive found the video on Facebook and uploaded it to their YouTube page.
Although easily missed, the ‘surface rupture’ event is best viewed by keeping a close eye beyond the gate to the right of the picture.
Dividing the driveway and the road beyond is the fault line – the boundary where two tectonic plates meet.
When the 7.7-magnitude quake hit, the ground moved as much as 20 feet (6 metres), according to 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive.
This is the first and currently only known instance of a fault line motion being captured on camera, the page says.
The city of Mandalay lies along the Sagaing Fault (pictured) – a tectonic plate boundary between the India and Sunda plates
As the tectonic plates move past each other, they catch and build up vast stores of energy. On March 28, that energy was released in a ‘slip-strike’ earthquake which caused widespread damage. Pictured a damaged road in Naypyitaw, Myanmar
The video was posted to YouTube on May 11, where it received 12,000 likes and more than 1,000 comments from astonished users.
One person said: ‘This video is going to be a staple in geology classrooms, while another called it ‘truly a groundbreaking video’.
A third said: ‘[It’s] terrifying to see the entire landscape shift, very visceral expression of the energy involved’, while a fourth said: ‘If you’re watching this for the first time and only notice the driveway, rewatch it several times looking at different areas.’
Another posted: ‘There’s so many amazing tiny details in this video, that 30 watches in, I’m still finding new things.’
Earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates that are sliding in opposite directions stick and then slip suddenly.
Myanmar sits directly on top of the Sagaing Fault – a highly active earthquake zone stretching 745 miles (1,200 km) through the heart of the country.
In this region, the Indian and Sunda tectonic plates slide past each other at a speed of 1.9-inch (49mm) per year.
When those plates catch and stick, they build up a vast reserve of energy which is then released in a violent ‘slip-strike’ earthquake, as has happened on March 28.
The earthquake destroyed buildings in neighbouring Thailand (pictured) and in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. According to the US Geological Survey, likely losses of life are between 10,000 and 100,000
The earthquake originated from a fault that runs the length of the country between the Indian and Sunda tectonic plates. It originated from a region called the Sagaing Fault, near Mandalay
In January, geologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the middle section of the Sagaing fault had been highly ‘locked’ – meaning the plates had been stuck for an abnormally long time.
This indicated that more energy was building up than normal and the researchers warned that the Sagaing fault would be ‘prone to generating large earthquakes in the future’.
The March 28 earthquake killed more than 5,300 people in Myanmar, as well as more than 100 in neighbouring Thailand and one person in Vietnam.
It was the most powerful earthquake to strike Myanmar since 1912 and the second deadliest in Myanmar’s modern history.
The Earth is moving under our feet: Tectonic plates move through the mantle and produce Earthquakes as they scrape against each other
Tectonic plates are composed of Earth’s crust and the uppermost portion of the mantle.
Below is the asthenosphere: the warm, viscous conveyor belt of rock on which tectonic plates ride.
The Earth has fifteen tectonic plates (pictured) that together have moulded the shape of the landscape we see around us today
Earthquakes typically occur at the boundaries of tectonic plates, where one plate dips below another, thrusts another upward, or where plate edges scrape alongside each other.
Earthquakes rarely occur in the middle of plates, but they can happen when ancient faults or rifts far below the surface reactivate.
These areas are relatively weak compared to the surrounding plate, and can easily slip and cause an earthquake.
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