Fans celebrating Liverpool’s record equaling 20th English Premier League soccer title, literally shook the earth.
Using advanced monitoring equipment deployed in earthquake-prone regions such as Chile and Italy, scientists at the University of Liverpool captured motions produced by supporters inside the team’s iconic Anfield stadium.
More than 60,000 people packed into the ground to watch the team’s 5-1 win over London’s Tottenham Hotspur which saw them secure the championship title.
They were joined by researchers from the university’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Environmental Sciences who measured ground movement from the crowd throughout the match.
They found the most significant tremor came after Alexis Mac Allister’s stunning strike in the 24th minute, which put Liverpool 2-1 ahead.
It registered a peak magnitude of 1.74 on the Richter scale, researchers said in a statement Thursday
Although these small tremors were not strong enough to be felt in the stands, the experiment showed that energy of human emotion can be captured by geoscience in “powerful and surprising” ways, said Farnaz Kamranzad, a postdoctoral research associate involved in the study.“Who knew that football fans could generate seismic energy?” Kamranzad said in the statement.
“Every cheer, every celebration, leaves a trace beneath our feet, a seismic fingerprint of collective joy, written into the Earth’s memory long after the final whistle!” she added.
The second-largest tremor was triggered by Mohamed Salah’s goal in the second half of the game, which made the score 4-1 and registered a magnitude of 1.60.
The “sheer passion” of Liverpool fans was “literally powerful enough to move the Earth,” said Ben Edwards, professor of engineering seismology at the University of Liverpool, who was also part of the study.
A magnitude of 5.3 is classified as a moderate earthquake, about three times stronger than the greatest tremor of 1.74 recorded at the game, according to the United States Geological Survey.
Other events have also registered on the Richter scale, including two Taylor Swift’s 2023 “Eras Tour” in Seattle, a geology professor at the Western Washington University said at the time, although the frequencies were “mostly below the range of human hearing.”
