Taylor Swift concerts do cause small earthquakes
It is a beautiful clear night in July 2023 and more than 70,000 people are packed in the arena in the Lumen field in the open air just south of the city center of Seattle. They came with sparks, glitter and, of course, handmade snake capes. Once inside, the lights become dark, a scoring clock projection, then, Taylor Swift herself appears. Thousands of people jump, cry and shout at “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”. The surprising result of these festivities? An earthquake of magnitude 2.3: the first swiftquake in the world recorded in the world.
The Seattle Swiftquake was the first, but certainly not the only time it happened. During the Taylor Swift Taylor Swift eras tour, closed windows caused many seismic activities. But were they trampling Swifies Really causing earthquakes in good faith?
A team of researchers from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Trinity College Dublin decided to study just this before the closed shopping race of Swift, three nights at the Dublin Aviva stadium. After the concert, they shared their results on social networks and the traditional media in a coordinated effort to stimulate scientific education by using Swift Star power. Their results were recently published in the International Science Education Journal reveal surprising seismic results.
Before “the sparks fly”
Before the concert, the team, led by Eleanor Dunn du Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, installed 42 seismometers in 21 different places in stores and houses around the stadium. “Many residents were interested in the results of the project and were happy that their house was used as a seismic station for a few weeks,” the authors wrote in the study.
Dunn has also launched a new hashtag, #SwiftquadUBlin, and a logo for the project “to capture the curiosity of swifies”. It really seemed to work because people online and the traditional media started to take the wind of the project relatively quickly.
“Are you ready for this?” The results
With the scene (and the seismometers), Taylor Swift began his race in Dublin on Friday June 28, 2024. Despite a dysfunction of the scene on Saturday evening, the Dublin tour was most certainly a “roaring beast” while Swifies shouted to some of the most popular songs of the singer, from “Love Story to” Blank Space “. Stevie Nicks and the now engaged in singer Travis Kelce went to Dublin concerts alongside 150,000 other Swifies, establishing a frequentation record for the stadium.
After the concert, the team collected and analyzed the data of each night. “The most significant increase in seismic displacement occurs towards the end of” love story “, they wrote in the study.
Just in front of the last refrain of the song, Swift sings: “He knelt up on the ground and released a ring and said … wife me Juliette, you never have to be alone.” It was at this precise moment that the greatest seismic activity was recorded while the crowd all jumped in time to the rhythm of one of the singer’s most emblematic songs.
However, the team’s “surprise” came when she examined the data collected by the Irish National Seismic Network (INSN). Created in 1962, ISN uses 10 permanent seismometers to detect seismic activity in Ireland and the surrounding area. When Swift played “Shake It Off” every night, two different Insn stations, one outside of Dublin and another further in the county of Wexford, recorded seismic signals. This means that the vibrations of some 50,000 Swifies that jump to “shake” have managed to travel to more than 62 miles. This is what some could call “Saint Ground”.
The “persistence” of citizen science and education
In addition to the seismometer data, the team also encouraged concert enthusiasts to share their own videos, in particular from the stadium headquarters, to see what the crowd did to specific points of the show. In total, Swifies submitted 306 videos of all three nights, helping to stimulate commitment with the work of the team in a fun and tangible way.
Shortly after the concert, the preliminary results were divided both on social networks and with traditional media in a press release. Overall, “SwiftquaduDublin was discussed in three podcasts, 24 radio programs, four television programs, 12 printed press articles and 53 press articles on the web, which results in about 40,238,273 media impressions.” All this cover helped people engage with science, to learn more about how seismic activity can be generated.
But has the seismic activity recorded during the Eras tour really qualified as an earthquake? Not in Dublin, it seems. But the massive vibrations that have traveled more than 60 miles from there, it is certainly not something that the authors or the Swifies should get rid of.
