If you want to experience what it’s like to cheer with the loudest crowd on the planet, just come to Seattle for an NFL game.
Not only did the Seattle Seahawks just spank the San Francisco 49ers in a Sunday night showdown, but the hometown fans set a new Guinness World Record for crowd noise.
The 12th Man first broke the old record of 131.76 decibles — set on March 18, 2011 at a soccer match in Turkey — during the first quarter of Sunday’s game, which also set an attendance record of 68,333 on hand. Then, the fans at CenturyLink Field broke their own record by turning the volume up even higher in the third quarter, bumping up the world record to 136.6 decibles.
Guinness was on hand to officially record the sound levels. The team was not part of the effort, so there were no cues for the crowd to get loud — they were just noisy naturally.
Here are a few tweets from Joe Tafoya, the man responsible for organizing the record-setting attempt via a group called Volume 12:
https://twitter.com/JoeTafoya/status/379409403486543872
https://twitter.com/JoeTafoya/status/379436049362976768
https://twitter.com/JoeTafoya/status/379448626512015360
https://twitter.com/JoeTafoya/status/379481877389651968
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who owns the Seahawks, was happy Sunday night.
https://twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/379479886840070144
I was actually lucky enough to be at CenturyLink Field tonight, and can report that it was really, really, really freakin’ loud. The most impressive part was that the crowd sustained its volume for the entire night, and as the Guinness sound measurements indicate, it became louder as the game went on.
Congrats, Hawks fans — that’s a pretty sweet record to have. Maybe it was all those noise-making apps that helped us enter the record books.