I recently read an article about the 2025 Myanmar earthquake.

And before I go any further, I want to acknowledge it was a magnitude 7.7 – 7.9 earthquake, categorised as Major. Generally these can travel as far as 250km, and severely damage if not collapse buildings.

The March 2025 earthquake killed about 5,500 people across Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam as well as injuring another 11,500 people, leaving many others missing.

In the human scale of things, this incident has scientific interest, but none that will likely contribute to further safety in earthquake prone areas.

Earthquake causes

According to Professor Brian Kennett and Professor Richard Arculus, most earthquakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding about over the earth. Sometimes they’ll crash together to form a new mountain range, pull apart to create a space, or one will ride roughshod over the other, forcing it beneath.

Tectonic plates move slowly. They grind against each other, and as the pressure builds up over time, well, it just… um… pops. And these ruptures cause seismic waves radiating in all directions – down into the earth, and around the crust.

Back to Myanmar

It just so happens, that the Myanmar quake was caught on CCTV, and Jesse Kearse, a geophysics postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University, shared the footage.

Normally, earthquake analysis is performed using seismological recordings, but in this footage, you can actually see the movement of the seismic wave across the terrain.

The total sideways movement in this earthquake is typical of strike-slip fault ruptures, which move the land sideways (in contrast to faults that move land up and down).

Jesse Kearse

The video is significant in that it confirms a curved rather than straight movement of fault lines in this type of quake, and offers the opportunity to reinterpret geological evidence from previous earthquakes.

I’m not a geophysicist, so a lot of the technical detail goes over my head, but nonetheless, the video is fascinating.