Pretty Sure I Saw the Dallas Tornado Play the Cleburne Quake at Cobb Stadium Once

Brian Stump, the Albritton Professor of Geological Sciences in SMU's Dedman College and part of the team set to study the recent Cleburne quakes, wants you to calm the eff down. Seriously. It's all right. Nothing to worry about. It's nature, for God's sakes. Right, Prof. Stump?The recent earthquakes that...

By Robert Wilonsky

June 11, 2009

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Brian Stump, the Albritton Professor of Geological Sciences in SMU's Dedman College and part of the team set to study the recent Cleburne quakes, wants you to calm the eff down. Seriously. It's all right. Nothing to worry about. It's nature, for God's sakes. Right, Prof. Stump?

The recent earthquakes that have occurred near Dallas-Fort Worth and Cleburne are not unexpected: They illustrate the earth's natural dynamic nature. Rocks in the earth's crust store energy that is relieved when faults slip, and this motion generates the waves that are felt or recorded during an earthquake. In the stable part of the continental crust, such as the DFW area, the release of stored energy occasionally results in small earthquakes like those recently observed. It is not unusual for these events to occur in sequence over a short period of time.

Course, if he's wrong and we're all doomed, there's this related good news out of SMU: It just hired the U.S. Army Reserve Major General who commanded more than 4,000 engineers and soldiers in the 926th Engineer Brigade in Baghdad.

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