No, the Phillies crowd was not loud enough to register on a Penn State earthquake detector
A Penn State scientist debunks a viral rumor from Game 3 of the World Series.
The Phillies’ five home runs were of seismic importance to the roaring fans at Game 3 of the World Series.
But contrary to what was claimed in a viral tweet Tuesday night, the cheering, stomping fans were nowhere near loud enough to be measured on a seismometer at Penn State’s campus in Brandywine, 20 miles from Citizens Bank Park.
That’s no knock against the fans, said Laura Guertin, a Penn State earth sciences professor and a Phillies fan.
“Even though we have very energetic fans in Philly, we’re not generating that much energy,” she said. “No stadium, no matter how loud it is, is going to generate enough seismic waves that it’s going to transmit 20 miles.”
Even when a seismometer was placed inside the stadium at a 2018 University of Michigan football game, researchers estimated the vibrations at a magnitude of just 1 on the Richter scale.
Penn State monitors the earth’s vibrations with 71 seismometers across the state, in collaboration with the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Protection. The equipment can detect earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 occurring anywhere in the world, Guertin said.
Those vibrations are transmitted through the earth’s crust, not through the air, like sound waves.
The seismometer at Penn State’s Brandywine campus is the closest one to Citizens Bank Park. Though it didn’t capture the roar of the World Series crowd, it often does pick up the rumble from nearby trucks on Route 352, Guertin said.
The claim about the crowd’s roar also was disputed by CBS meteorologist Tammie Souza.
She tweeted that the purported Penn State seismograph reading actually appeared to have been captured last month in San Francisco.
“Fake! This is seismograph from #SanFrancisco quake October 25th!” she said.
Still, Penn State’s Guertin allowed that the ballpark crowd was as loud as they come.
The scientist is such an avid baseball fan that she got married at Campbell’s Field in Camden in 2004, the home of the Riversharks minor-league team that has since been demolished.
And she is pulling for the Phillies, even if she can’t measure her fervor with instruments.
“We’ve got a red wave going on,” she said. “We don’t have a seismic wave.”