The Taylor Swift era tour has been torn apart great records in ticket sales, but their concerts in Edinburgh, Scotland, only tipped another scale: the seismic scale. Fans at his concerts last weekend danced so hard they generated seismic activity that was felt almost four miles away from Murrayfield Stadium, according to the British Geological Survey.
BGS says three songs consistently generated the most seismic activity during each of the three Edinburgh shows: “…Ready For It?” “Cruel summer” and “champagne problems”.
“…Ready for it?” kicks off with a heavy, booming bass beat and clocks in at 160 beats per minute, making it the perfect song to cause seismic tremors, BGS said. The crowd transmitted about 80 kilowatts of power, or about the amount of energy created by 10 to 16 car batteries, according to BGS.
The concert on Friday, June 7, showed the most seismic activity, with the ground showing 23.4 nanometers of movement, BGS found.
Gareth Cattermole/TAS24
Although the crowd shook the Earth enough to be recorded by BGS monitoring stations miles away from the site, people in the immediate vicinity of the stadium were probably the only ones who felt the Earth shake.
This isn't the first time a crowd has created an earthquake, and Swifties are usually to blame.
During a 2011 NFL playoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New Orleans Saints at what was then called Qwest Field in Seattle, Marshawn Lynch made a play that drove the crowd so wild it caused a tremor which was recorded on a seismometer.
Scientists were interested in the shaking of the stadium, which earned Lynch a new nickname: “Beast Quake.” But last July, Swift proved that it's not just football fans who can create tremors in Seattle. During his Eras Tour concert at the venue, an earthquake recorded on the same seismometer.
“The actual amount that the ground shook the most was about twice as much during what I refer to as the Beast Quake (Taylor's version),” Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, told CBS News at the time. . “Also, of course, it lasted hours. The original Beast Quake was a celebration by some very excited fans that lasted maybe 30 seconds.”
When Swift toured Los Angeles' SoFi Stadium in August, a research team from the California Institute of Technology recorded the vibrations created by the 70,000 fans in the stands.
Motion sensors near and in the stadium, as well as seismic stations in the region, recorded vibrations during 43 of the 45 songs. “You Belong with Me” had the biggest local magnitude, clocking in at 0.849.
