Taylor Swift really does make the earth move

During Taylor Swift’s performances in Edinburgh recently the stadium rocked so hard that seismologists picked up the tremors 6km away.

Taylor Swift on stage. Picture: AFP.

Taylor Swift gave fair warning in her hit song Shake it Off: “Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.”

Scientists can now confirm that the American pop star’s fans have followed her advice with seismic readings recorded by the British Geological Survey (BGS).

Over three nights from last Friday to Sunday, Swift sang for 220,000 fans at Murrayfield, ­Edinburgh. And they made the earth move.

The stadium rocked so hard that seismologists picked up the tremors 6km away. A Swift fan among the geologists even helped the team identify which songs provoked the biggest reaction.

The findings were possible because of an unusual conjunction. Swift’s carefully choreographed performance was identical each night, allowing the scientists to overlay successive evenings and tease out the Swift rhythms from the background Edinburgh noise.

Sophie Butcher, a volcanologist, was in the audience one night. “The monitoring team was looking through the data on Monday and there was a really clear signal,” she said. “So an email landed in my inbox and asked, ‘You’re a seismologist and you’re a Swiftie. Could you have a crack at matching up which songs could have caused this signal?’ ”

Along with Shake it Off, Butcher said she saw clear signals from the dancing to Cruel Summer and the four-minute applause to Champagne Problems. The biggest seismic spike came with Ready For It, Swift’s 2017 hit.

Ms Butcher said the results were not a surprise. She added: “If you can imagine, you have 73,000 people in one concentrated place – jumping, clapping, dancing.

“As well as that, there’s a big bass sound system. All of that energy travels through the ground.”

Swift is not the first star to provoke a seismic reaction from fans. Geologists in Barcelona found they could decode the results of games through the reactions when Lionel Messi scored and the stadium jumped as one.

Swift has moved on in her UK tour and was spotted in London on Tuesday enjoying a night out with Kate Moss, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Cara Delevingne, Chrissie Hynde, Lena Dunham and a lone man, the Irish actor Andrew Scott.

The Edinburgh audience may have been disappointed that despite their fervent appreciation of Swift, the BGS could not give the concert a formal position on the earthquake magnitude scale.

They will have to be satisfied, however, with the knowledge that according to BGS estimates the maximum amplitude of movement attributable to Swift’s performance amounted to 23 nanometres – a relatively modest figure.

Even so, Ms Butcher said that this crowd movement was quite something.

She added: “The fact you’re able to record the activity of 73,000 people jumping and dancing to their favourite songs, at such a great distance, is really impressive.”

She suggested it proved her suspicion that Scottish Swifties were the best. She added: “This has cemented their reputation for enthusiasm.”

THE TIMES