From enduring brutally crowded environments to showing out in record-breaking numbers for concerts, Taylor Swift’s fans never cease to amaze us with their enthusiasm for the 12-time Grammy winner. In fact, their devotion can be literally earthshaking.
At Swift’s Eras Tour performances at Lumen Field in Seattle on July 22 and 23, fans of the singer-songwriter danced and cheered so hard that they generated seismic activity similar to that of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach told CNN Thursday.
Caplan-Auerbach told the outlet that “the shaking was twice as strong” as the 2011 Beast Quake, when Seattle Seahawks fans celebrated running back Marshawn Lynch’s playoff touchdown at a game at Lumen Field.
“The primary difference is the duration of shaking,” Caplan-Auerbach said of the two epic incidents, which were both detected on the same local seismometer. “Cheering after a touchdown lasts for a couple seconds, but eventually it dies down. It’s much more random than a concert.”
Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, added: “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.”
Swift’s fans were shaking it off so much that CNN reporter Chloe Melas, who attended one of the Seattle shows, later said: “You could literally feel the ground shaking beneath your feet.”
Twitter users hilariously reacted to the unprecedented incident.
Swift herself took note of the support from her Pacific Northwest fans, thanking them for “all the cheering, screaming, jumping, dancing, singing at the top of your lungs” in an Instagram post on Monday.
“That was genuinely one of my favorite weekends ever,” she wrote.