EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Swift fans dancing and jumping created last year’s “Swift quakes”

When mega pop star Taylor Swift gave a series of concerts last August at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, regional seismic network stations recorded unique harmonic vibrations known as “concert tremor.”

A similar,had occurred the month before in Seattle, prompting scientists from the California Institute of Technology and UCLA to take a closer look at seismic data collected during Swift’s LA concert.The Caltech/UCLA team didn’t just rely on the data from the regional network stations.

The scientists placed additional motion sensors throughout the stadium prior to the concert, enabling them to characterize all the seismic signals produced during the concert. The signals had such unique characteristics that it was relatively easy to identify them with a spectrogram. In fact, the authors were able to identify 43 of the 45 songs Swift performed based on the distinctive signal of each song.