When Mexico's national football team scored the winning goals against Ecuador on Tuesday, seismic sensors around the area registered vibrations strong enough to resemble a small earthquake. It was not the first time a football celebration in Mexico has rattled seismographs, and scientists are now pushing back on the popular label attached to these tremors, the so called artificial earthquake.
The local seismic alert system noted on its social media accounts that the outburst of euphoria and mass cheering produced vibrations in the local area. A similar phenomenon occurred during Mexico's debut against Germany at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when Mexico's Institute of Geological and Atmospheric Research reported that, following Hirving Lozano's winning goal, a seismic signal of artificial origin was detected, possibly caused by mass jumping by fans.
Norway and a Taylor Swift concert felt it too
What makes this even more striking is that the phenomenon can occur thousands of miles away from where the match is actually being played. Geophysicists detected vibrations in Bergen, Norway, when the country's team scored goals during the group stage in the past few weeks.
Something similar happened in 2024, when a Taylor Swift concert at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles generated long-duration, low-frequency signals, with harmonic frequency peaks between 1 and 10 Hz, that were picked up by seismic monitoring sensors.
Why the artificial earthquake label doesn't hold up
For several years, the term artificial earthquake has been used to describe this kind of atypical vibration recorded by seismological systems during sporting events or large scale performances. Experts, however, believe the term is not the right way to describe what's actually happening.
To begin with, artificial earthquakes do genuinely exist and have been studied for decades. Research from the geosciences department at Durham University defines them as human-induced earthquakes, caused by activities capable of altering the geological behavior of the ground, such as the construction of high-rise buildings, groundwater extraction, tunnel excavation, enhanced oil recovery, hydraulic fracturing, or underground gas storage.
Under that definition, the vibrations detected by SASSLA following the Mexican team's goals cannot be classified as an artificial earthquake. Experts explain that for ground movement to qualify as an earthquake, it has to be tied to an actual geological process. The mere fact that a seismograph records a disturbance does not make it an earthquake.
A leading geophysicist calls it a joke
Arturo Iglesias, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, explained several years ago that although human activity generates movements capable of being picked up by seismographs, that doesn't mean they are genuine geological phenomena that can be measured using seismic magnitudes or that they cause changes beneath the surface.
Iglesias added that seismic monitoring systems are sensitive enough to detect micro-movements in the ground, whether of natural origin or resulting from human activity, and noted that readings can be influenced by factors such as the location of the stations, the characteristics of the terrain, or the intensity of certain activities happening on the surface.
Even if a person jumps next to a sensor, it gets detected, but it's not an earthquake. An earthquake caused by the scattered activity of fans is a joke, Iglesias stresses.
Why scientists still want to study these tremors
Even so, the unusual vibrations generated by the simultaneous movement of thousands of people, as happened after the Mexican national team's goals on Tuesday, have become an increasingly relevant field of research.
Experts maintain that a better understanding of these signals will help develop more precise methods for analyzing seismic activity and make it easier to distinguish between the different types of vibrations recorded by instruments. This knowledge could also strengthen emerging applications such as seismic interferometry, a technique that harnesses vibrations produced by everyday sources to study the structure of the subsurface without needing controlled explosions or having to wait for a natural earthquake to occur.
