History Main / EarthquakesCauseFissures

* At the end of the [[Music/IgorStravinsky "Rite of Spring"]] segment of Disney's ''Disney/{{Fantasia}}'', a massive earthquake strikes. One of the first things to occur is the ground ripping apart to form a canyon like two hands grabbed the earth and pulled in opposite directions.

->''"Do you fear a shake of the earth? It would take a large crack to swallow [[FatBastard you]] up."''

It's yet another area in which nature fails to observe the RuleOfCool. ([[TropesAreTools Probably for the best.]])

* ''Film/{{Jumanji}}'': The final danger unleashed by the game is an earthquake. It causes a fissure that rips the house the Parrish family mansion in half. This is at least partly a good thing, since it frees Alan, who was trapped in the floor due to the game turning the ground to quicksand earier.

->''"Do you fear a shake of the earth? It would take a large crack to swallow you up."''
-->-- ''[[Literature/DeathLands Red Holocaust]]''

* ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales'' did this on more than one occasion. Most notably, an earthquake kicked off a major plot arc when the fissure opened up under Scrooge's money bin (after he comically raced it home and tried to stop it) and all of his money fell deep inside the earth.

* Cracks are shown all over the backglass of ''Pinball/{{Earthshaker}}''.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Footage out of Japan from the 9.0 2011 Tohoku earthquake includes amateur video clips of cracks opening up in the pavement, albeit cracks too small to swallow more than a careless toe.
** Images are available online of fissures about six inches wide from the Miyagi Prefecture.
* The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit New Zealand in 2010 reportedly shifted parts of the country up to 11 feet sideways, and actually did create some menacing but shallow fissures. Some photos can be [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1310461/New-Zealand-earthquake-damage-1-8bn.html found here.]]
* The strongest earthquake of "recent" years, the one in Chile last century, actually had this happen. Since it was so long ago, all we have are [[UnreliableNarrator unreliable narrators]], but people that old actually say that the ground opened up and ''swallowed houses''. Make of that what you will, and don't overlook that Chile is a mountainous country, making tremor-induced landslides plausible.
* Fissures are a regular formation produced in association with earthquakes in Iceland, but they are from the same cause, not the consequence of the quakes. They are often an immediate prelude to a fissure eruption, a phenomenon common in volcanism in Iceland (due to the unusual geological structure of the island) and rare elsewhere. Fissures also periodically open up in the spreading zone without immediate vulcanism (although you'd have to be mad to live in the spreading zone as it is highly subject to vulcanism).
* Footage from the 7.8 April 2015 quake in Nepal showed several large cracks torn in the ground (though none appeared wide enough for a person to enter).
[[/folder]]

* The stated purpose of [[EarthquakeMachine Experiment 513]] in ''WesternAnimation/LiloAndStitchTheSeries'' was to "bifurcate" a planet in half with earthquakes.

* The Creator/SciFiChannel movie ''MegaFault''. The premise is that a giant earthquake opens a crack from the east coast to the ''Grand Canyon''. ''[[ArtisticLicenseGeology Argh]]''!

* The protagonist in ''[[Literature/AsianSaga Shogun]]'' gets a very powerful friend by saving him from such a fall during an earthquake.

[[caption-width-right:350:You can't [[{{Pun}} fault]] Mother Nature for decreasing property values.]]

* In FrankZappa's "Billy The Mountain", an earthquake causes an "[[EddieFisher Oh, my]] [[{{Pun}} Papa...]]", exposing "pools of poison gas, and obsolete germ bombs", although, in this case, the earthquake isn't caused by a fault-line, [[ItMakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext but a mountain that got up and walked away]].

Sometimes, unlucky victims will [[IFellForHours fall for hours]] down the cracks until the reach anything.

* While it's a small one compared to many other examples, in ''Film/{{Ghostbusters}}'' the eponymous crew fall into a fissure when an earthquake strikes just before they go in for the final showdown. A moment of drama and then they crawl out and wave.

* In the earthquake episode of SpikeTV's ''Surviving Disaster'', a massive earthquake along the New Madrid fault line (y'know, the one in ''mid-eastern U.S.'', the one that hasn't had a major earthquake since ''1812''?) creates an equally massive sinkhole in a park. Semi-justified in that stress along faults BUILDS the longer an area goes without a tremor to "relieve" the stress. Even in areas not a plate boundary, and IDontMeanDinnerPlates.

[[caption-width-right:350:You can't fault Mother Nature for decreasing property values.]]