Can the ground open up and/or close during an earthquake like they show in movies?
The ground typically doesn’t open up and/or close like the movies so often show. In “10.5,” the ground “chases” and swallows a moving train, a city is swallowed up whole, and a car sinks into gravelly dirt. It’s not going to happen. Earthquakes certainly can have ground-changing effects at the surface: rupture of the fault plane; liquefaction and lateral spread, where relatively flat ground can crack, flow, and turn into a kind of quicksand; and landslides and rock falls. Fault rupture and landslides typically don’t open up holes in the ground. As a matter of fact, both usually result in the buildup of the dirt and rock. Of the three effects, liquefaction is the most likely to cause “holes” in the ground, but there are not many cases where liquefaction actually swallows up individual people. It typically causes most of its damage to structures that don’t have an adequate foundation to resist settlement. Overall, the science fact is that liquefaction opens holes in the ground but the pe
