At a University of Utah football game, you may feel the stadium shake or rumble during a third-down defensive play while Utah’s MUSS performs its patented “third-down jump” or after a touchdown. Geoscientists at the U. are now measuring how much energy is being put in the ground during these big-play events with seismometers, and even live-tweeting the measurements during games.
Before last week’s win against the Florida Gators, Utah seismologist Jamie Farrell installed a seismometer at Rice-Eccles Stadium to record the earth-shaking movements created by fans’ reactions to what they were viewing.
In a news release, Farrell explained that during games they are “going to try to convert the amount of energy that gets released either over an entire game or if there’s a big event, where it shakes a lot, and try to convert that into equivalent magnitude, how much energy is put into the ground.” This allows them to compare events, like touchdowns, third-down stomps, or even the team running into the stadium.
During the game, Farrell and his associates live-tweeted seismic data from the U of U Seismograph Stations’ official account, @UUSSquake on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
But what do these readings mean? How does Bryson Barnes’ 70-yard touchdown pass to Money Parks equate to other seismic events?
Measuring seismic events is complicated. Seismometers are extremely sensitive and record vibrations from the ground directly beneath them. The strength of the shaking is expressed from 0-10 on the Richter scale. This scale conveys magnitude on a base-10 logarithmic scale, which is a fancy way of saying that each order of magnitude represents a 10-times increase in intensity from the last one. Two is 10 times more intense than one, 3 is 100 more intense than one, and so on.
Typically, an earthquake needs to score a 2.0-2.5 on a Richter scale to be felt by people. While Farrell and his team are still working on understanding how the events during the football game scored, he roughly estimates that the largest peaks fell somewhere between 0-1.
“The shaking from the Trax on the Red-line is pretty equivalent to the shaking produced from the stadium,” Farrell said. “These events are not perceptible if you were out in the parking lot, you wouldn’t feel these readings.”
As a reference, the earthquake that hit Magna in 2020 recorded a 5.7 on the Richter scale.
For Ferrall and his team at the U of U Seismograph Station, this fun experiment at football games has practical implementations. “We install temporary seismographs like this at aftershock locations,” he said. “We do these types of things to draw attention to stuff like the ground shaking so people know how to respond to events as needed”
The seismograph will be in place for the rest of Utah’s football season.
