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 weren’t sure if the seismic activity was caused by the sound systems or by the thousands of fans dancing to the music, but a new study by Caltech seismologists found that the fans were at blame.
Swift performed at SoFi Stadium in front of about 70,000 Swifties — die-hard Taylor Swift fans — in August 2023, when seismologists recorded a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in the city.
It was the second “fast quake” on the West Coast, after Seattle, Washington, experienced its own earthquake during its Eras Tour concert the previous month.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Triggered 2.3 Magnitude Earthquake in Seattle and Los Angeles Last Year
Swifties caused an earthquake in Seattle and Los Angeles by dancing to music
Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ Created the Most Seismic Activity Among Her 45 Songs
The California Office of Emergency Services asked scientists to examine the seismic activity caused by the Seattle concert to determine what exactly happened the night the Swifties and the city shook.
Seismologists installed powerful motion sensors the night of Swift’s Los Angeles performance on August 5 to record where Swift’s earthquake originated and which songs were linked to the most seismic activity.
Seismic activity matches the frequency and severity of an earthquake, although Gabrielle Tepp, study co-author and seismologist at Caltech Seismic Lab, said their findings were more akin to a volcano than an earthquake.
“For earthquakes, most of the time they are pretty sharp and easy to identify by the waveforms, but when you have something like volcanoes where you have a wide variety of signals, the spectrograms can be very useful in helping to identify different types of earthquakes.” signals,” she explained.
Researchers originally thought the seismic activity was caused by the audio systems and not the fans and conducted tests to determine which was to blame.
Researchers found that each Taylor Swift song generated ‘a distinct shaking signal’
“Shake It Off” emitted the largest magnitude of 0.85 compared to his other songs
The team monitored earthquake meters about 6 miles from SoFi Stadium and used spectrograms — a graph that showed signal strength or the volume of a song.
They discovered that each Swift song “had a distinct tremor signal.”
“Researchers were able to identify 43 of the 45 songs played in the recorded spectrograms,” the study states.
The spectrogram revealed that while all the songs had a seismic impact, Swift’s song “Shake It Off” had the greatest magnitude, 0.85.
“Keep in mind that this energy was released in a matter of minutes, compared to a second for an earthquake of this magnitude,” Tepp said.
“Based on the maximum strength of the shaking, the strongest shaking was equivalent to a magnitude -2 earthquake,” she added.
Tepp, who is also an amateur guitarist, said that when she and her team documented their first results, her intuition was that if you had a harmonic signal as nice as this, it must come from the music or instruments or something.’
Instead, researchers found it was the tremors of the crowd moving to the beat of the “Karma” singer’s hit music.
They experimented by playing songs on a speaker next to the motion sensor and jumping up and down next to the sensor while Swift’s song “Love Story” played.
Tepp also tried a separate experiment in which she plugged her bass guitar into the speaker and played a repetitive beat.
To Tepp’s surprise, the bass guitar did not create a harmonic signal on the pickup, but discovered that skipping to “Love Story” was the culprit.
“Even though I wasn’t good at staying in one place, I ended up jumping around in a small circle, like at a concert. I was surprised how clear the signal was,” Tepp said.
The researchers compared their results to other concerts and found that the summer’s other headliner – Metallica – had the weakest signals at each concert, leading them to believe that these were the fans jumping and moving during Swift’s concert that caused the 2.3 magnitude earthquake.
“Metal fans like to headbang a lot, so they don’t necessarily bounce,” Tepp said, adding, “It could just be that the way they’re moving doesn’t create as strong a signal.”