Taylor Swift Concert in Santa Clara, California (Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
What happened to the seismographs in Seattle during one of his concerts is explained a little better.
Pop singer Taylor Swift performed two shows of her tour last week at Lumen Field in Seattle, USA, with more than 70,000 people attending on July 22. Talking to snn On Friday, seismologist Jackie Kaplan-Auerbach reported that during concerts, a seismograph near the stadium recorded signals similar to those of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake: the news was widely covered by the media around the world, including Italian, and the definition of “Swift Quake” spread (shake means earthquake in English) to define the phenomenon described by Kaplan-Auerbach without too much explanation of what the supposed “seismic activity” mentioned in the headlines is.
As explained The newspaper “New York Times Kaplan-Auerback himself, seismographs register any vibration in the earth, even the most insignificant, caused by cars, trucks, trains and even wind. They do this by measuring the acceleration of ground motion, which is then converted to the Richter scale most commonly used for earthquakes. And the maximum acceleration of vibrations due to Swift’s concert, according to seismologists, was 0.011 meters per second squared.
This is a parameter comparable, though much larger, to that found at Lumen Field itself in 2011 during a last-minute touchdown of a Seattle Seahawks football game. At the time, there was talk of the “Beast Quake”, nicknamed by the touchdowner Marshawn Lynch. The vibrations generated by cheering fans have been compared by seismologists to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake: for people to feel the vibration of the earth, it must reach a threshold of at least 2.5, and often even 3.
The vibrations recorded during Swift’s concert were undoubtedly exceptional, about twice as intense as that time in 2011, but the so-called “seismic activity” that we are talking about during these hours is happening continuously, without our knowledge. There have been other occasions of notable vibration around Lumen Field, such as during The Weeknd’s concert last summer, although to a lesser extent than the Swift concert and the Seahawks landing.
The attention of journalists to the “seismic activity” caused by mass events is not new: a rather famous and memorable case was a U2 concert at the Flaminio Stadium in Rome in 1987. alarmed calls were received from some residents of the area who feared an earthquake.
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