Taylor Swift rocked Seattle. Literally.
Seismologists say the enthusiasm of the crowd at the Eras tour stop at Lumen Field triggered the same tools that measure for earthquakes—and the stomping from fans dancing was on par with a 2.3 magnitude quake.
Good news for others in the region. Typically, a quake of that magnitude is not felt.
Still, it’s an impressive achievement. And it’s bringing back memories of 2011, when Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch went into “Beast Mode” and scored an impressive touchdown, setting off a wild celebration that came to be called a “Beast Quake” by local experts.
For the record, Swifties are rowdier than NFL fans, says Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, the geology professor at Western Washington University who tracked the tremor.
“For those of you asking about how this compares to the Beast Quake of 2011, I haven’t looked at the amplitude of that yet, but honestly, I can’t imagine that the Beast Quake will come close to this,” she wrote on Facebook Monday. “If nothing else, there were way more people at the concert than at the football game, and they were more likely to move in synch, so the ground would resonate better.”
The Eras tour has been an event of unprecedented magnitude since it was announced. Swift’s first tour in five years, it resulted in a meltdown on Ticketmaster that has led to the U.S. Congress looking into the company. When tickets for the European leg of the tour went on sale, Ticketmaster once again was unable to keep up with demand.
The Seattle stop was one of the last in the U.S. Swift plays two more stops in California over seven shows before heading to Mexico City at the end of August. The tour has been such an economic force of nature that it received a mention in a report from the Federal Reserve earlier this month.
