Taylor Swift fans attending the singer’s concerts in Edinburgh last week caused spikes in seismic activity detected miles away from the city's Murrayfield Stadium, where the performances took place.
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00:00The British Geological Survey, the BGS, maintains a network of these seismic instruments around
00:16the UK, and they're very sensitive instruments that record small ground motions, so we're
00:20normally just looking for very small earthquakes that we have in the UK, and serendipitously,
00:26because we're only such a short distance from Murrayfield Stadium, with such a large
00:30concentration of people, we were able to record this anthropogenic, this human, this noise,
00:36and it's evident on the seismic data for all three nights of the concert.
00:40We're very fortunate that because Taylor's show is incredibly well choreographed and
00:43timed with the lights and the graphics and the dance troupe, the show runs at exactly
00:48the same time intervals every night, so we can see on all three days, the spikes occur
00:53at the same points. Fortunately, I was there, and I was taking lots of photos and videos,
00:59and so I was able to cross-reference when the big spikes happen with the timestamps
01:05on my photos, and we could work out, okay, 8.22, that's the start of Ready For It, that's
01:10when this kind of, and that's a song that has sort of stompy, sort of jumpy dancing
01:14with fans doing something similar, so that kind of corresponds to when that big spike
01:18occurs.
01:19The instrument itself is incredibly scientific, so the science comes. My colleagues here in
01:23seismology have done the work to calculate exactly how big those spikes are and what
01:29sort of energy was being transmitted from the show. I had the fun bit of coming in and
01:34matchmaking with the songs.
01:35This was identified back in last summer in Australia, so the swift quake was first reported
01:42in Seattle, so much so a team for a show later on in the summer in California specifically
01:48set up some seismometers to record this. At Murrayfield, because of the proximity to
01:53the seismic station we have in Edinburgh, we have previously measured activity from
01:58Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles and Beyonce, who were all here last summer as well.