Don’t look at the cracks spreading on the pavement captured from a power utility’s facility during the massive, shallow March 28th earthquake in Myanmar. Keep your eye on the other side of the fence.
California seismologist Wendy Bohon tells the CBC this is the first time ever that a fault line rupture has been caught on camera while the earthquake was actually happening. “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. So to see it actually happening was mind-blowing,” said Bohon. It’ll become the Zapruder film of geology, studied frame-by-frame for decades, perhaps longer, until a better one surfaces. Which isn’t to say this one’s bad. In fact the angle’s like 75 percent of the way to the camera having been purposely placed to observe the fault line, minus the gate in the way.