Taylor Swift’s U.K. Crowd Generates Seismic Activity. Key Song Causes Most Vibrations

TIME

Taylor Swift fans attending the singer’s concerts in Edinburgh last week caused spikes in seismic activity detected miles away from the city's Murrayfield Stadium, where the performances took place.

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00:00The British Geological Survey, the BGS, maintains a network of these seismic instruments around

00:16the UK, and they're very sensitive instruments that record small ground motions, so we're

00:20normally just looking for very small earthquakes that we have in the UK, and serendipitously,

00:26because we're only such a short distance from Murrayfield Stadium, with such a large

00:30concentration of people, we were able to record this anthropogenic, this human, this noise,

00:36and it's evident on the seismic data for all three nights of the concert.

00:40We're very fortunate that because Taylor's show is incredibly well choreographed and

00:43timed with the lights and the graphics and the dance troupe, the show runs at exactly

00:48the same time intervals every night, so we can see on all three days, the spikes occur

00:53at the same points. Fortunately, I was there, and I was taking lots of photos and videos,

00:59and so I was able to cross-reference when the big spikes happen with the timestamps

01:05on my photos, and we could work out, okay, 8.22, that's the start of Ready For It, that's

01:10when this kind of, and that's a song that has sort of stompy, sort of jumpy dancing

01:14with fans doing something similar, so that kind of corresponds to when that big spike

01:18occurs.

01:19The instrument itself is incredibly scientific, so the science comes. My colleagues here in

01:23seismology have done the work to calculate exactly how big those spikes are and what

01:29sort of energy was being transmitted from the show. I had the fun bit of coming in and

01:34matchmaking with the songs.

01:35This was identified back in last summer in Australia, so the swift quake was first reported

01:42in Seattle, so much so a team for a show later on in the summer in California specifically

01:48set up some seismometers to record this. At Murrayfield, because of the proximity to

01:53the seismic station we have in Edinburgh, we have previously measured activity from

01:58Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles and Beyonce, who were all here last summer as well.

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