Devastating 2025 Myanmar earthquake sheds light on how the 'Big One' could play out in California

Last year's massive earthquake in Myanmar could help researchers better predict where the worst shaking will be if the "Big One" hits the San Andreas Fault in California.

The magnitude 7.7 quake hit on March 28, 2025, near the city of Mandalay and shook buildings as far away as Bangkok, 830 miles (1,330 kilometers) away.

The death toll was at least 3,700 people .

New research that used detailed satellite data and a one-of-a-kind video of the ground rupturing reveals that the fault had a twisty, almost helical shape, which affected the shaking.

The Sagaing Fault in Myanmar that triggered the quake is analogous to many strike-slip faults worldwide that threaten population centers, said Alice-Agnes Gabriel , a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the new research, which was published Oct.

14 in the journal Nature Communications .

This includes California's San Andreas Fault, which is similarly tilted and likely capable of generating a 7.8 magnitude earthquake .

Studying what happened as the ground ruptured near Mandalay can reveal what might occur in future earthquakes on similar faults, Gabriel told Live Science.

"The idea is, we cannot predict when and where an earthquake might happen" along a particular fault, she said, "but we may be able to predict certain aspects of it." Gabriel uses powerful supercomputers to model earthquake scenarios, but these scenarios are only as good as the data that goes into them.

In the case of the Myanmar quake, the researchers had a unique piece of data to ground-truth their model on: a security video of the ground cracking as the fault ruptured .

This phenomenon had not been captured on video before.

Damage from the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that hit on March 28, 2025, near the city of Mandalay. (Image credit: Photo(s) taken by Dr.

Tha Zin Htet Tin of East Yangon University) The researchers' models revealed that the fault is not a vertical plane under the ground.

Instead, the surface dips west on the northern end of the fault, becomes vertical in the middle, and then dips eastward at the southern end, they found.