Pop singer Taylor Swift‘s song, Shake it Off, took on a whole new meaning after her concert caused an earthquake in Los Angeles last year.
At the time, researchers were unsure if the seismic activity was caused by the sound systems or the thousands of fans who were dancing to the music, but a new study by Caltech seismologists has revealed the fans were to blame.
Swift performed at the SoFi stadium in front of roughly 70,000 Swifties – die-hard Taylor Swift fans – in August 2023 when seismologists recorded a 2.3 magnitude earthquake in the city.
It marked the second ‘Swift Quake’ on the West Coast, after Seattle, Washington experienced its own earthquake from her Eras tour concert the month before.
The California Office of Emergency Services asked scientists to look into the seismic activity caused by the Seattle concert to determine what exactly happened the night Swifties and the city shook.
Seismologists set up strong motion sensors on the night of Swift’s LA performance on August 5 to record where the Swift quake originated and which songs were tied to the most seismic activity.
Seismic activity is the frequency and severity of an earthquake, although Gabrielle Tepp, a co-author of the study and staff seismologist at Caltech Seismic Lab, said their findings were more akin to a volcano than an earthquake.
‘For earthquakes, most of the time they’re pretty sharp and easy to identify with waveforms, but when you have something like volcanoes where you have such a wide variety of signals, spectrograms can be really handy in helping to identify the different types of signals,’ she explained.
