On Friday evening, people in southeast Berlin felt the ground below them move. The 1.4 magnitude tremor was felt at precisely 8:58 pm in the evening, at the same time as Florence And The Machine were on stage at the Tempelhof Sounds festival in Berlin’s now-shuttered Tempelhof Airport, prompting people to wonder whether the outdoor event with 60,000 attendees was truly an earth-shattering show.
Florence And The Machine’s set-time was at 8:30 pm, and looking at the setlist, about a half-hour into the show, it’s a good bet that the band was playing either the classic, “Dog Days Are Over” or the emphatic “Free” off of the new album, Dance Fever. German outlet rbb|24 reports that someone at the show indicated, “…There was a moment around 9 pm when quite a few jumped at the same time. You could also feel the vibrations on site.” Could this really have caused such an impact? Data scientist Jens Skapski seems to think so.
“The signals probably go back to a concert. We don’t usually have earthquakes in Berlin, that’s why I wanted to know more about it,” Skapski told rbb|24. According to the rbb|24 report, “Three private seismological stations in the immediate vicinity of Tempelhofer Feld registered an above-average deflection, 1.4 on the local magnitude scale.” It lasted close to a minute, which makes it more of a tremor and not necessarily an earthquake. Skapski adds that “It’s equivalent to a small earthquake,” but that, “A natural earthquake would be shorter and with a higher frequency.”
So while we already knew that Dance Fever was a banger of an album from Florence Welch and company, this takes it to a whole new level.
