Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour has ended huge records in ticket sales, but her concerts in Edinburgh, Scotland, communicated a slightly different scale: the seismic scale. Fans at her concerts last weekend danced so hard they generated seismic activity that could be felt nearly four miles from Murrayfield Stadium, according to the British Geological Survey.
BGS says three songs consistently generated the most seismic activity at each of the three Edinburgh shows: “…Ready For It?” ‘Cruel summer’ and ‘champagne problems’.
“…Ready?” starts with a loud, blown-out bass beat and is 160 beats per minute, making it the perfect song to induce seismic shocks, BGS said. The crowd transferred about 80 kilowatts of power, or about the amount of power generated by 10 to 16 car batteries, according to BGS.
The Friday, June 7 concert showed the most seismic activity, with the ground moving 23.4 nanometers, BGS found.
Gareth Cattermole/TAS24
As the crowd shook the earth so much that it registered at BGS monitoring stations miles away, those in the immediate vicinity of the stadium were probably the only ones who felt the earth shaking.
This isn’t the first time a crowd has caused an earthquake – and Swifties are usually the culprits.
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 got the crowd so wild that they caused tremors that registered on a seismometer.
Scientists were interested in the stadium shake, which earned Lynch a new nickname: “Beast Quake.” But last July, Swift proved that it’s not just football fans who can cause tremors in Seattle. During her Eras Tour concert at the venue, an earthquake registered on the same seismometer.
“The actual amount of ground shaking at its most severe was about twice as much during what I call the Beast Quake (Taylor’s Version),” Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, told CBS News at the time. . “Of course, it also lasted for hours. The original Beast Quake was a celebration of some very excited fans that lasted maybe 30 seconds.”
When Swift made her tour to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles 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 and seismic stations in the region registered vibrations during 43 of her 45 songs. “You Belong with Me” had the largest local magnitude, registering at 0.849.
