Seattle Seahawk Fans Cause Minor 'Quake'
Updated: Tuesday, 11 Jan 2011, 12:16 PM CST
Published : Tuesday, 11 Jan 2011, 12:15 PM CST
(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Seattle Seahawks fans managed to make some noise during the pivotal play of Saturday's
game, but it wasn't quite the Earth-shaking event everyone thought.
The
Seattle Times reported that fans did at least come near that after Saturday's upset over the New Orleans Saints. As Marshawn Lynch ran the ball for 67 yards to score a touchdown, a 66,336-person crowd cheered and stomped so much that a nearby seismometer registered the vibrations as if it was a small earthquake.
John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington, said the stands were shaking. It was like a localized 1 or 2 magnitude quake.
"There was a clear 30 seconds or so of moderate shaking," he told the Times. "It's probably not the first time it's ever happened, but it's the first time we ever noticed."
Yahoo! Sports said the network registered a small tremor from a monitoring system near the Old Kingdome, tore down to make room for new
baseball and football stadiums. It was just at that one area.
Yahoo! Sports writer Doug Farrar said he heard from a colleague that the ground did indeed shake after Lynch's run. He said he was in the press box but heard the noise erupt as the fans went crazy.
"We're used to serious noise coming out of that stadium, but it was unreal, and the fans kept it up all the way through the game," he said.
As it goes, the actual extent to which the crowd shook the ground wasn't realized until the next day. The Seattle Times said Vidale wasn't at the game and wasn't even watching it that day. He figured Seattle would lose.
Deadspin.com said Vidale was watching YouTube footage the next day and checked the seismic monitoring station. He said it registered 100 yards away but probably didn't travel very far.
Vidale said tens of thousands of stomping and cheering fans are likely enough to set it off. It just hadn't been noticed before.
The Seattle Times said a similar event happened in 2006 when Cameron scientists noticed short simultaneous spikes across the African country. Scientists eventually figured out they happened every time the national soccer squad made a goal in televised games of the African Cup of Nations.