AC/DC’s return to the stage in Australia after a decade was powerful enough to register on earthquake monitoring equipment.
The Thunderstruck rockers performed at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Wednesday (12.11.25), marking their first Australian concert since 2015.
The show formed part of their PWR UP tour and drew tens of thousands of fans. The combination of high-volume sound systems and crowd movement generated ground vibrations of two to five hertz, as recorded by the Seismology Research Centre, located over three kilometres away.
Adam Pascale, chief scientist at the centre, explained how the concert’s physical impact was recorded.
He said: “The sound waves that people were experiencing nearby and feeling something through their bodies, that’s the equivalent to what our seismographs feel. We’re picking up the ground motion, we’re not picking up the sound from the air.”
He added that both the speaker vibrations and the audience’s movement contributed to the readings.
Pascale continued: “So you’ve got speakers on the ground pumping out vibrations and that gets transmitted through the ground, but also the crowd jumping up and down is feeding energy into the ground.”
He further explained that coordinated crowd movement increases the strength of the signal, adding: “If everyone’s sort of bouncing in unison, it tends to amplify the signal so we can pick it up a little bit better. Whereas, if it’s sort of just general crowd motion, like even at the grand final at the MCG, we can still pick that up.”
The Melbourne concert featured a setlist of AC/DC staples, including Back in Black, Thunderstruck, and Highway to Hell.
The band is scheduled to play additional stadium dates in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane.
The Seismology Research Centre has previously recorded similar crowd-generated vibrations during major sporting events, but AC/DC’s performance marked one of the strongest concert-related signals in recent years.
