Taylor Swift fans cause 2.3-magnitude ‘Swift Quake’ in Seattle

George Walker IV / AP

She never missed a beat and was lightning on her feet when the “Shake It Off” artist and her fans caused a “Swift Quake” in Seattle during her “Eras Tour” concerts.

According to seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, two of Taylor Swift’s concerts generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake, as CNN originally reported.

The data was gathered from Swift’s sold-out “Eras Tour” performances at Lumen Field on July 22 and 23, after Swift’s fans, and possibly the sound system, shook the ground so hard that it recorded a maximum ground acceleration of roughly 0.011 meters per second squared, causing what is now being called a “Swift Quake.”

Caplan-Auerbach, who’s a geology professor at Western Washington University, told CNN that this data compares to a 2011 NFL game, when the Seattle Seahawks fans went crazy over Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch’s touchdown during a game against the New Orleans Saints and caused a seismic activity that was then named a “Beast Quake.”

Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, CNN Newsource

“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.”

Caplan-Auerbach pointed out that even though there is only a 0.3 magnitude difference between the “Beast Quake” and the “Swift Quake,” the Swifties are the MVPs for outperforming the Seahawks fans in terms of enthusiasm and excitement.

“The shaking was twice as strong as ‘Beast Quake.’ It absolutely doubled it,” said Caplan-Auerbach, adding that the length of cheering played a big role in the data. “Cheering after a touchdown lasts for a couple seconds, but eventually it dies down. It’s much more random than a concert. For Taylor Swift, I collected about 10 hours of data where rhythm controlled the behavior. The music, the speakers, the beat. All that energy can drive into the ground and shake it.”

MORE: Sweet post from ‘Swiftie dad’ thanking Taylor Swift fans goes viral

After the concert, Swift took to Instagram to thank her fans and said that “all the cheering, screaming, jumping, dancing, singing at the top of your lungs” made that one of her favorite weekends “ever.”

Swift’s Seattle concerts were played in front of a crowd of more than 144,000 fans over two nights, and they came towards the end of the U.S. leg of the “Eras Tour,” according to the Seattle Times.

By Scripps News

Curiosity, Entertainment, Music, News

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