According to CNN, Taylor Swift’s recent Eras show at Seattle’s Lumen Field stadium registered seismic activity equal to that of an hours-long 2.3 magnitude earthquake.
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“I grabbed the data from both nights of the concert and quickly noticed they were clearly the same pattern of signals,” Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist and geology professor at Western Washington University, who first observed the shift in an earthquake group that she moderates on Facebook, told CNN. “If I overlay them on top of each other, they’re nearly identical.”
The cheering has been compared to Marshawn Lynch’s 2011 “Beast Quake” touchdown, when his run caused such loud cheering and excitement that it also registered.
“The primary difference is the duration of shaking,” Caplan-Auerbach added to 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.”
Earlier in July, Swift reacted to the news of “Anti-Hero” passing one billion streams on Spotify by adding an Instagram Story message of “Thanks a billion guys” followed by an exploding head emoji. It followed the TikTok message of congratulation by veteran jazz figurehead Herb Alpert on Swift equalling his record of four simultaneous Top 10 albums on the Billboard chart.
“Anti-Hero” was Swift’s ninth No.1 on the Hot 100 and her longest-running, at eight weeks, and now becomes her fourth to pass Spotify’s one billion threshold, from a total of 449 songs by all artists in the history of the streaming service. Her previous such achievers are 1989’s “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off,” plus her collaboration with Zayn for the Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack, “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.”
