Taylor Swift fans danced so hard during her concerts they created seismic activity in Edinburgh, Scotland
Taylor Swift's Era's Tour has broken huge records in ticket sales, but her concerts in Edinburgh, Scotland, just tipped another scale — the seismic scale. Fans at her concerts last weekend danced so hard they generated seismic activity that was felt nearly four miles away from the 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?" starts with a loud, blown out bass beat and is 160 beats per minute, making it the perfect song for triggering seismic shakes, BGS said. The crowd transmitted about 80 kilowatts of power, or about the amount of power created by 10 to 16 car batteries, according to BGS.
The Friday, June 7 concert showed the most seismic activity, with the ground showing 23.4 nanometers of movement, BGS found.
While the crowd shook the Earth enough for it to register at BGS' monitoring stations miles from the venue, people in the immediate vicinity of the stadium were likely the only ones to feel the Earth shaking.
This is not the first time a crowd has created a quake — 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 drove the crowd so wild they caused shaking 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 it's not just football fans who can create tremors in Seattle. During her Eras Tour concert at the venue, a quake registered on the same seismometer.
"The actual amount that the ground shook at its strongest was about twice as big 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. "It also, of course, lasted for hours. The original Beast Quake was a celebration on the part of some very excited fans that lasted maybe 30 seconds."
When Swift took her tour to Los Angeles' SoFi stadium in August, a California Institute of Technology research team 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 out of her 45 songs. "You Belong with Me" had the biggest local magnitude, registering at 0.849.
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Caitlin O'Kane is a New York City journalist who works on the CBS News social media team as a senior manager of content and production. She writes about a variety of topics and produces "The Uplift," CBS News' streaming show that focuses on good news.
