Taylor Swift fans make the earth move at Edinburgh gig

By Katy Scott, BBC Scotland News

Thousands of Taylor Swift fans made the earth move by cheering and dancing at her three Edinburgh concerts last weekend.

Fans took the singer's encouragement to Shake It Off literally, with monitoring stations detecting seismic activity from 6km (3.73 miles) away.

The energetic Swifties made the biggest commotion during three songs: Cruel Summer, Ready For It? and champagne problems.

And it seems the 73,000-strong Friday night crowd danced, cheered and stomped the loudest of the three gigs.

It marked the first of 17 UK dates for Swift, which will culminate in a record-breaking eight-night run at London’s Wembley Stadium.

The 152-date stadium tour is on track to make more than $2bn (£1.56bn) by the time it wraps up in December, making it the most lucrative concert tour in music history.

During her three Murrayfield performances, Swift played to 200,000 fans who came from all over the world to see her career-spanning, three-hour show.

The Friday night concert was the most energetic by a small margin with fans making the ground move a maximum of 23.4 newton-meters (nm), compared to 22.8nm and 23.3nm on the Saturday and Sunday respectively.

The seismic activity was mainly caused by dancing and reached its peak at 160bpm during Ready For It?

The Swifties created approximately 80kW of power during the song, equivalent to around 6,000 car batteries.

Shake It Off and Cruel Summer made the ground move, but detectors even shook during a four-minute long applause for champagne problems.

Swift's previous tour dates in Seattle and Los Angeles registered similar events, with her Seattle gig generating activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) is the UK's national earthquake monitoring agency and its detectors are sensitive enough to pick up the smallest seismic activity miles away.

Fans travelled to Edinburgh from all over the world to see the 14-time Grammy winner. Photo: PA

Callum Harrison, BGS seismologist, said: "It’s amazing that we’ve been able to measure the reaction of thousands of concert goers remotely through our data.

"The opportunity to explore a seismic activity created by a different kind of phenomenon has been a thrill.

"Clearly Scotland’s reputation for providing some of the most enthusiastic audiences remains well intact!"

The movement was detected at two monitoring stations, and the furthest away of which was 6km away at the BGS office at Heriot Watt University.

However experts said the movement generated by the concert was unlikely to have been felt by anyone other than those in the immediate vicinity.