Scottish fans of megastar Taylor Swift caused the ground to shake during the American singer’s concerts at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield stadium last weekend, Britain’s earthquake monitoring agency (BGS) reported on Thursday.
Two monitoring stations around the city recorded seismic activity Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening, up to 6 km around the stadium where the pop star was performing, produced by a mixture of dancing at the same time and power of the stadium sound system.
Two hundred thousand fans attended these monumental shows lasting around three hours, which inaugurated Taylor Swift’s concert series in the United Kingdom before London, Cardiff or Liverpool.
The British Geological Survey even drew up a diagram showing that these are the songs Ready For It?, Cruel Summer And Champagne Problems which each time aroused the greatest enthusiasm of the fans.
At the peak of the concert, they transmitted “80 kW of power, the equivalent of around 6,000 car batteries,” he estimated.
“Scotland’s reputation, with one of the most enthusiastic audiences, is clearly intact! », welcomed BGS seismologist Callum Harrison.
These “induced” earthquakes, which do not have a natural origin, “were detected by sensitive scientific instruments designed to identify the tiniest seismic activity […]but it is unlikely that the vibrations generated by the concert were felt by anyone other than those in the immediate vicinity,” the institute stressed.
According to him, the biggest activity was recorded on Friday evening, during the first date in Scotland of the star’s monumental sixth tour.
Last July, Taylor Swift’s concert in Seattle, United States, had already generated seismic activity of magnitude 2.3 – an announcement that some experts subsequently described as exaggerated.
The Eras Tour, which began in March 2023 in the United States, became at the end of last year the first tour in history to sell more than a billion dollars in tickets. A figure that is expected to more than double by the time it expires in Canada in December.
In terms of benefits, Taylor Swift’s tour should, on the other hand, generate almost a billion pounds for the British economy, Barclays bank indicated in May, with nearly 1.2 million spectators.