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1 Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Imperial College, London
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Concepts such as the sedimentation compression curve and overconsolidation ratio have a special resonance for geologists because they provide us with additional tools for studying the history of sedimentation and the stratigraphic succession. Colour, grain size, bedding, mineralogy and palaeontology all make their contribution to such work, but neither these nor geochemistry, nor geophysics can provide the algorithm which reveals the history of fabric development and its ability to resist load. Here the yield stress ratio is of great value.
When defined by Professor Burland, this ratio was seen as providing a useful measure of resistance that could not be explained by friction alone and a valuable insight into those aspects of a sediment’s history which this resistance reflected. Professor Chandler has now taken this further by laying out for us the links between this ratio and the processes of deposition, and erosion, seen so often in basinal sedimentation. These he has presented as a Sensitivity Framework with which the properties and possible history of sediments may be compared. A number of outcomes of immediate interest to geologists result from this approach of which two will be mentioned here.
The first is that the Framework provides the context for grouping and separating deposits where similarities and differences may not have been apparent by other means; by the same reasoning it may also reveal either the presence or absence of a correlation between mechanical properties and other aspects of a sediment’s character.
The second is the consistent difference that occurs between
