And Petroleum Engineers use explosives in the course of their work.
Off the top of my head, oil deposits are found by the analysis of seismic data after setting off a series of underground explosions
"Off the top of my head, oil deposits are found by the analysis of seismic data after setting off a series of underground explosions"
A Jihadi trifecta, if you're looking to blow things up in the host country, huh? Oil, explosives, infidels ... cue up the Beverly Hillbillies theme, lol. "Well, the first thing you know ..."
I had no idea -- makes sense -- what a deadly combination in the wrong hands like the terrorist. They learn to do it all right here.
Not so much anymore. Modern instrumentation is much more sophisticated. They still need some kind of impulse, but they don't need one as strong as an explosion. I don't know that they ever did the explosions underground, except in the sense that they would put the explosive in a shallow hole, probably to direct the force of the expanding gases up, while the "recoil" impulse would propagate into the ground. Now, and for some time, they use thumper trucks, or even something similar to a low frequency sonar transmitter to provide the impulse. They have detectors set up in a large array to record the echos from the underground strata. I don't know what they use to process the signals these days, but in the late '70s early '80, Geophysical Services (then part of Texas Instruments) used the TI built Advanced Scientific Computer, which was a water cooled equivalent to a Cray I. These days they probably use a network of processors, by analogy to similar kinds of processing I'm more familiar with.
I recall many years ago an oil company, trying show off how environmental sensitive they were, had a commercial where they showed a marine version of thumper. It was just a towed rubber sleeve that they could cause to go "boink" by pumping it full of air, or something, very quickly.