Watch the Earth Tear Itself Apart in This Insane Myanmar Earthquake Video

In a year already stacked with climate disasters, the Earth tossed in a wild geological rumble in Myanmar, hitting the Southeast Asian nation with a 7.7 magnitude earthquake back in March.

The quake brought us what might be the first-ever video of the ground literally splitting apart in real time along a surface fault rupture.

The clip was captured at the Green Power Energy Solar Project in Tha Pyay Wa, Mandalay. At the risk of editorializing, it’s scary as fuck.

The video, which gained popularity when it was shared on Reddit, and originally posted on Facebook by a Singaporean engineer named Htin Aung, begins innocently enough. Still footage of a driveway in the foreground, a security gate in the mid-ground, and dusty hills and horizon behind it.

Then the rumbling begins, first noticeable in the blurring of the gate’s iron grating. And then it picks up, detaching the gate from its locking mechanism. The gate slides back, revealing just enough to provide a clear view of the ground behind, just as a crack splits open in the ground beyond the gate, a massive fissure yawns as the right side of the landscape slips backward a few feet in a way that befuddles and confuses.

You’re only supposed to see effects like that in movies, not in real life.

Shocking Video Shows Earth Tearing Open During Myanmar’s Earthquake in March

Speaking to Live Science, Rick Aster, a geophysicist at Colorado State University, called it “the best video we have of a throughgoing surface rupture of a very large earthquake.” The seismologist’s goldmine. The footage may eventually make its way into academic studies, assuming the details about its exact location and context can be pinned down.

The quake tore along the Sagaing Fault, a strike-slip fault system where tectonic plates grind horizontally past one another. These faults are responsible for some of the most devastating quakes in history, and Myanmar sits directly on one of the most active segments in Asia.

It’s a scientific spectacle for sure, but there is a devastating human element that the spectacle threatens to overshadow. Official numbers are still sketchy, but UN estimates report over 3,800 people have died, thousands injured, and entire towns flattened.

This all hit a country already dealing with a military dictatorship, and an ongoing civil war, and now its citizens have to deal with a large-scale natural disaster and a humanitarian crisis.