Earthquake or Taylor Swift concert? VIDEO of the concert was like an earthquake. See below article.
Taylor Swift performs during her Eras Tour at Sofi stadium in Inglewood, California, August 7, 2023. Researchers say the show resulted in seismic activity.
MICHAEL TRAN/AFP via Getty Images
It appears Taylor Swift fans, better known as “Swifties,” don’t just like to “Shake It Off,” they like to shake the Earth too.
A recent study from the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, shows a Swift concert at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in August 2023 actually caused seismic activity equivalent to an earthquake. Swift’s hit song, “Shake It Off,” with all of the dancing, jumping between concertgoers and stage performers actually produced a magnitude 0.851 tremor.
The study points out that more than 70,000 fans were inside SoFi Stadium for the Swift concert.
“Keep in mind this energy was released over a few minutes compared to a second for an earthquake of that size. Based on the maximum strength of shaking, the strongest tremor was equivalent to a magnitude -2 earthquake,” Gabrielle Tepp of Caltech said in a statement.
Tepp and her Caltech team concluded the dancing and jumping motions of the audience at SoFi Stadium—not the musical beats or reverberations of the sound system—that likely generated the concert’s distinct harmonic tremors, according to a news release of the study.
Other concerts at SoFi Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, were also analyzed for seismic activity and Tepp’s team reports a show by hard rock legends Metallica also shook the ground.
“Other concerts had nice straight-line harmonic signals, but the signals from the Metallica concert were slanted and kind of weird looking,” Tepp continued. “We don’t have a great explanation for that yet.”
Tepp also mentions the movement of the people is for sure what caused the tremors; eliminating any possibility it was the sound waves from musical instruments through speakers and subwoofers.
But California isn’t the only place to experience what’s being referred to as a “Swift Quake.”
A report from CNN shows the “Tim McGraw” singer packed Seattle’s NFL stadium and those fans came together to produce a magnitude 2.3 equivalent earthquake.
Seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach the “Swift Quake” in Seattle was just as powerful as the “Beast Quake” from 2010 — a fan-produced quake after the Seattle Seahawks scored a touchdown in a pivotal playoff game.
“I grabbed the data from both nights of the concert and quickly noticed they were clearly the same pattern of signals,” Caplan-Auerbach told CNN. “If I overlay them on top of each other, they’re nearly identical.”
