(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) It was recently revealed that Taylor Swift fans caused an earthquake in Los Angeles last year while they were jumping to the pop star’s songs.
Researchers were unsure if the seismic activity was caused by the sound systems or the thousands of fans who were dancing to the music at the time, according to the Daily Mail. However, a new study by seismologists from the California Institute of Technology revealed that it was the fans who were the cause of the earthquake.
In August 2023, Swift performed at the SoFi stadium in front of roughly 70,000 of her fans when seismologists recorded a 2.3 magnitude earthquake in the city, which marked the second “Swift Quake” on the West Coast after Seattle experienced its own earthquake from her Eras tour concert just one month before that.
Scientists were asked by the California Office of Emergency Services to look into the seismic activity caused by the Seattle concert to determine what exactly happened.
Seismologists set up strong motion sensors on the night of Swift’s performance in Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2023, to record where the “Swift quake” originated and which songs were tied to the most seismic activity, the news source reported.
The Mail added that the team monitored quake meters from roughly 5.5 miles from the SoFi Stadium and used spectrograms – a graph that showed the signal intensity or loudness of a song. Eventually, they found that each of Swift’s songs “had a distinct tremor signal.”
“Researchers were able to identify 43 of the 45 songs played within the recorded spectrograms,” the study stated.
While all songs did have a seismic impact, Swift’s song “Shake It Off” song had the largest magnitude of 0.85, the spectrogram revealed.
“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, a co-author of the study and staff seismologist at Caltech Seismic Lab, said.
