Taylor Swift fans cause ‘2.3-magnitude earthquake’ during shows

nypost.com:

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour wasn’t creating enough of a groundswell, Swifties caused such a ruckus during the Seattle, Washington leg that they generated the equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake — rivaling the legendary “Beastquake” of 2011.“This was much bigger,” Western Washington University geology professor Jackie Caplan-Auerbach told King 5 after comparing the tectonic activity.The groundbreaking phenomenon occurred over the weekend while the “Antihero” singer had performed sold-out back-to-back shows to over 144,000 fans at Lumen Field, the Seattle Times reported.Little did the Grammy winner know that her concert would prove earth-shattering in the seismic sense: The activity from the three-and-a-half-hour marathon caused quite a commotion on a seismometer located next to the stadium, which prompted Caplan-Auerback to conduct a study to see if it surpassed the previous Lumen record caused by the Beastquake.

For those unfamiliar with Seattle sports lore, this seminal event occurred in 2011 after Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch scored a touchdown and fans went wild.To see how the two events compared tectonically, Caplan-Auerback first analyzed data from the two Swift shows. “I grabbed the data from both nights of the concert and quickly noticed they were clearly the same pattern of signals,” the scientist explained, per CNN. “If I overlay them on top of each other, they’re nearly identical.”The only difference was that the Sunday performance was delayed by 26 minutes — which was corroborated by fans online, who said the show had indeed been postponed by half an hour.She then cross-referenced the data with the number of the “Beastquake” and found that the discrepancy was only about 0.3 on the seismometer..