Co-seismic surface fault displacement captured in videos: image tracking across three earthquakes

Abstract

Surface displacements, including co-seismic fault slip, have occasionally been captured by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. Such video recordings may provide information unavailable from seismometers located away from the fault. We analyzed videos of surface displacement from three earthquakes---the 2018 Hualien earthquake, the 2025 Mandalay earthquake, and the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake---using a unified methodology. We removed the effects of strong ground motion by aligning each frame so that reference regions in the image remained fixed. This analysis enables the temporal evolution and, in particular, the duration of surface displacement to be estimated. Although the three earthquakes ranged from $M_\mathrm{w}$6.4 to $M_\mathrm{w}$7.7, the tracked motion lasted approximately 2 s in all three cases; in the Hualien case, the motion included compression of the ground rather than fault slip alone. Comparison with field surveys indicates that the maximum velocity was on the order of 1 m/s in each case. The 2026 Kumamoto earthquake, however, exhibited a more complex velocity history than the other two events. The three earthquakes involved different mechanisms of surface fault displacement, suggesting that these differences may also influence the complexity of the displacement time histories.