Seismological Research Letters Volume 82, Number 1 January/February 2011 115 doi: 10.1785/gssrl.82.1.115 How a Soccer Stadium Helps with an Education in Science and Seismology Diego Melgar 1 and Xyoli Pérez-Campos 2 INTRODUCTION At Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) there is a tight bond between researchers from the Geophysics Institute’s (IG) Seismology Department and geophysics engi- neering undergraduate students from the university’s Faculty of Engineering. Several researchers teach a number of math, physics, geophysics, and seismology-related courses and are ofen on the lookout for undergraduate students whom they can recruit for their research activities. Conversely, a student might reach out to the researcher and indicate an interest in extending his or her activities beyond the classroom. Senior students who are more versed in the disciplines of geophysics ofen know which feld they would like to extend their activities into and are more readily absorbed into some research group. However, if the student is still at an early stage in his or her degree, fnding suitable activities for him or her is more challenging because of the student’s limited knowledge of the underlying physics and underdeveloped mathematical toolkit. Here we will discuss the experiences gained from such a case in which, under an adviser’s guidance, a student undertook a very simple yet enlightening research project in seismology at the middle of his degree in geophysics engineering. We will show how the project aided the student in preparing and devel- oping basic scientifc research methodologies, critical analysis capabilities, and essential seismological tools for a more serious investigation in seismology and tectonophysics that was to hap- pen later as part of his undergraduate thesis. THE PROJECT With the intent of designing a research experience that was fun and engaging, yet scientifcally sound, an old project that was almost a rumor was resurrected. Te National Seismological Service (SSN), operated for the Mexican government by the IG, has a broadband network throughout the country. One of the stations, CUIG, is located in a vault within UNAM’s main campus in southern Mexico City. A basaltic masonry sta- dium, built to host the 1968 Olympics with a seating capacity of 63,000, is located 1.5 km away from the seismometer (Figure 1). Te Olympic glory is all but faded now, but the stadium still hosts one of the most popular teams in the Mexican profes- sional soccer league, the UNAM Pumas. Te story goes that on a night in August 2003, an intern serving on the graveyard shif at the SSN saw her routine activi- ties interrupted by an alarm indicating seismic activity was being registered at station CUIG; however, when she looked at the records, she could not discern any earthquakes but could observe some signal with waveforms very di ferent from the tell-tale shapes of earthquakes. Afer a few more alarms, and recalling that it was a game day, she correlated this activity to a very noisy game happening at the stadium, concluding that the stadium must be the source of this noise. Whether the stadium’s signal actually tripped the alarm is the subject of folklore, but the project set forth to our student was to investigate whether any signal was registered at CUIG during Pumas games and to characterize said signal, and perhaps answer basic and fun questions such as: Could you read the story of the game from the record? Can you pinpoint where the goals happen? Can you tell where a close call hap- pened and if a shot hit the crossbar? The Essential Tools When the project began, the frst step was for the student to become acquainted with the basic computing framework that is used by most seismologists at one point or another: how to utilize a command line OS (Sun Solaris in this case) and query via fp the database, utilizing SAC to correct the records for instrument response (afer a brief detour to explain basic linear systems theory and why instrument correction is necessary); and how to utilize shell scripts to take the tedium out of pro- cessing records for multiple games. Afer these data collection preliminaries, the advisor decided that Matlab was the most suitable platform for the stu- dent to develop his own sofware, both because of some previ- ous knowledge he had of the scripting language and because of routines already built in, which given his limited knowledge of many analysis tools enabled him to utilize pre-coded functions. Analyzing the Records By suggestion of the adviser and given that the student was already taking his frst Fourier theory course, the frst step 1. Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, D.F., México; now at Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, U.S.A. 2. Departamento de Sismología, Instituto de Geofísica, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, D. F., Mexico. Eduquakes E D U Q UA K E S