This eerie four-minute video shows a landslide crawling across rural Russia. But the term landslide doesn't really capture how dramatically the Earth is engulfing trees, power lines and road - it's more like a tsunami of dirt.
There's not much information online about the video, except that it was filmed on 1 April 2015 in Zarchnyi, which the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Landslide blog believes is in western Russia. This makes sense, as it's currently thawing season there and the perfect conditions for this type of destruction.
According to the AGU blog, the video shows a type of landslide known as an earthflow, which is a slow, downslope movement of find-grained materials, such as sand or soil, that have been saturated with water. In these incidences, the Earth actually becomes viscous and flows down a hill as a result of gravity. And believe it or not, the one captured in this video is quite quick, with some earthflows taking years to visibly move.
It's also clear that the footage was filmed by someone who is impressively calm as he slowly backs away, filming just metres in front of the destruction (he even takes a phone call halfway through, no big deal). As fascinating as this footage is to watch, if that was me, I'd be out of there before the first tree gets swallowed up. Hats off to you, camera guy.
Source: American Geophysical Union