Unusual yet positive headlines follow seemingly every stop on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. Since Swift's July 23 concert at Seattle's Lumen Field, "Shake It Off" references have flown thanks to a natural disaster caused by boisterous Swifties.
Seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach told CNN that crowd noise plus the volume of Swift and her band caused the equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.
It beats out the Beast Quake: a 2 magnitude reaction in 2011 to a touchdown scored by the Seattle Seahawks' Marshawn Lynch.
"The primary difference is the duration of shaking," Caplan-Auerbach told CNN. "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."
Caplan-Auerbach added that shaking during the Swift concert "absolutely doubled" what registered during the Lynch play.
It's all reminiscent of Garth Brooks' April 30, 2022 Stadium Tour stop at LSU's Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La. While Brooks sang "Callin' Baton Rouge," the crowd response registered as a small earthquake on a professor's seismograph.
In addition, many concert-goers' Apple watches warned them that the stadium reached 95 decibels of sound during a singalong to one of the LSU athletic department's unofficial anthems.
To better establish the volume reached in Tiger Stadium, local ABC affiliate WBRZ reported that Sarah Rosemann, who lives about half a mile away, could hear the lyrics loud and clear.
It was the second time that an ovation in Tiger Stadium shook the campus. The LSU football team's game-winning fourth-down play against previously-unbeaten Auburn University on Oct. 8, 1988 —final score, 7-6— went down in SEC lore as the Earthquake Game.
