At the time, researchers were unsure if the seismic activity was caused by the sound systems or the thousands of fans who were dancing to the music, but a new study by Caltech seismologists has revealed the fans were to blame.
Swift performed at the SoFi stadium in front of roughly 70,000 Swifties – die-hard Taylor Swift fans – in August 2023 when seismologists recorded a 2.3 magnitude earthquake in the city.Seismologists set up strong motion sensors on the night of Swift’s LA performance on August 5 to record where the Swift quake originated and which songs were tied to the most seismic activity.
Seismic activity is the frequency and severity of an earthquake, although Gabrielle Tepp, a co-author of the study and staff seismologist at Caltech Seismic Lab, said their findings were more akin to a volcano than an earthquake.
‘For earthquakes, most of the time they’re pretty sharp and easy to identify with waveforms, but when you have something like volcanoes where you have such a wide variety of signals, spectrograms can be really handy in helping to identify the different types of signals,’ she explained.
