Shake it UP!

Here on the East Coast (pause for applause) we don't have to worry about earthquakes and such, not as much as they do out west, where Jackie Caplan-Auerbach is employed as a seismologist. She works as a geology professor at Western Washington University, and part of her job is watching for temblors. 

I'm happy to say that California has not yet tumbled into the sea, as Steely Dan fretted about, but several human incidents have registered out west on the earthquake scale...and the most recent was on July 23. 

By comparison, the other earthshaker out there was called the Beast Quake, when fans of the Seattle Seahawks went half wild when their burly running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch scored a touchdown in the 2011 playoffs, setting off a celebration that rivaled an earthquake.

But it took the fans of Taylor Swift to set the bar even higher a week or so ago when their dancing at both of Swift’s Seattle “Eras” tour concert stops at Lumen Field caused seismic activity equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, according to Ms Caplan-Auerbach.

Caplan-Auerbach saw on Facebook that a whole lotta shaking was going on, and she checked her seismograph, and sure enough, “I grabbed the data from both nights of the concert and quickly noticed they were clearly the same pattern of signals. If I overlay them on top of each other, they’re nearly identical.”

So who makes the earth move better, the Seahawks' vaunted "12th Man" crowd or the Swifties?

Caplan-Auerbach said the Swifties have the Seahawks fans beat. “The shaking was twice as strong as ‘Beast Quake’. It absolutely doubled it” because “Cheering after a touchdown lasts for a couple seconds, but eventually it dies down. It’s much more random than a concert. For Taylor Swift, I collected about 10 hours of data where rhythm controlled the behavior. The music, the speakers, the beat. All that energy can drive into the ground and shake it.”

And Ms Caplan-Auerbach wants to remind one and all that this is a perfect example of what science teachers keep trying to tell their students, that science is real!

 “What I love is to be able to share that this is science” she said, adding that “it doesn’t have to happen in a lab with a white coat. Everyday observations and experiences are science.”  

For extra credit, here are the seismo-readings for comparison.