On Saturday November 26, 2016 the attention of most sports fans in Michigan and Ohio was on Ohio Stadium in Columbus. Several Ohio State University students, working with Miami University in Oxford Ohio and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources also kept an eye on equipment recording seismic activity.
Since a Marshawn Lynch run in 2011 registered on seismographs around the Seattle Seahawks' stadium, scientists and engineers have been interested in the force that can come from groups of fans yelling and jumping.
Attendance of 110,045 was announced at Saturday's game, breaking a record at Ohio Stadium. Derek Sawyer, Wendy Panero and Ann Cook - all professors in the earth sciences at Ohio State, wanted the university to be the first measuring what the group calls 'fanquakes.' The project has been taking place during the 2016 football season and is used to teach data collection techniques, wave propagation, and local geology.
Working with the staff at the stadium three locations were found for the students' equipment. An office below the stadium, a spot at the top of the south stands in the student section, and a flagpole in the north stands all hold equipment drops. Seismometers sit on top of concrete floors, recording motion in the up-down, north-south, and east-west directions. A modem / antenna setup allows the team to record and collect data. This rigging is different than the usual applications in the area, where many seismic studies are done to understand the effects of fracking, powered by car batteries and solar panels.
If one of the simplest definitions of engineering is the application of science, then this is an awesome example of students learning scientific principles in an engineering project. The group's FanQuakes home page discusses the project's findings so far and some results that were unexpected. Let's hope that the next logical step in the process is to find a way to harness and use all of the energy being generated by large groups of people.
(Images courtesy of the Ohio State University and the FanQuakes page.)