Fans seeing a Metallica concert at Virginia Tech this week were so hyped for the band’s “Enter Sandman,” they were picked up by the college’s Seismological Observatory.
With Metallica playing Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, Virginia, on Wednesday, the crowd of over 60,000 responded to the 1991 hit song with jumping and screaming that reached seismic readings.
“Experiencing that live; the actual band playing it rather than the [football] games because we already get hyped from the games themselves, but hearing Metallica playing in the stadium live, it’s awesome, man,” junior Luke Dalton told Lynchburg’s WSET-TV.
The band faked closing out the concert before going into “Enter Sandman.”
“What we recorded last night is a lot bigger than what we see at a football game, so Metallica really got the crowd rocking there. What you’re seeing there is probably four to five times bigger than what we see typically for a football game,” Virginia Tech geophysics professor Martin Chapman told the TV station.
Earthquakes produce brief spikes of energy, while the energy from the fans was more spread out. If the energy they produced were added together, it would equal a magnitude 1 or 2 quake on the Richter scale, Mr. Chapman said.
Because it was spread out, however, the jumping and crowd noise was too small to register on the Richter scale, Mr. Chapman explained to Fox Weather.
