If you felt the ground shaking in Seattle last weekend, you weren’t imagining things, but it wasn’t an earthquake. It was just a Taylor Swift concert. The singer performed in the city last weekend on her Eras tour, and the fans were having so much fun the seismometers picked up on it.
The show sold out both nights with a record 72,171 fans packing the stadium on Saturday. All those excited Swifties enjoying the show led to readings on a local seismometer equivalent to those of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.
Seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, tweeted an image of the readings comparing them to the famous 2011 “Beast Quake.” In that instance, Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch scored a touchdown in an NFC wild card game and the fans’ reaction caused a spike in seismic readings. “I grabbed the data from both nights of the concert and quickly noticed they were clearly the same pattern of signals,” she said. However, the shaking from the concert “was twice as strong as ‘Beast Quake.’ It absolutely doubled it.”
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