When Texas Stadium went boom, in addition to providing space for transit-oriented development, the explosion itself provided the opportunity to do a seismological study of the area.
Dr. Jay Pulliam is a professor of geophysics at Baylor University and one of the people spearheading the study. He said knowing more about the crust and mantle below the Dallas-Fort Worth area can shed light about how the planet’s continents were formed.
That’s because North Texas sits atop the dormant Balcones Fault zone. It’s a spot where continents once collided and pulled apart, eventually forming the Earth’s land mass as we know it today.
“It’s a really interesting story because it’s the site of one of these major plate tectonic occurrences,” Pulliam said.
Yet a good subsurface look at the zone has been difficult. The makeup of matter beneath the ground typically requires two things – energy sources like earthquakes and seismographs to record the waves they create. Texas has never had much of either.
Sounds like more data is needed. I’ll leave it up to the good folks of North Texas to decide which other stadia might be used for these purposes.
You can bet that there are plenty of oil and gas companies that have seismic surveys of the Dallas-area geology, home of the fabled Barnett Shale. But they’re not going to give their raw data to some academic who will publish all their secrets for everyone to know.