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Discussion |
1 University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
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The authors have rightly drawn attention to the current status of Engineering Geology. The history of the last 50 years explains the problem. The rapid expansion of interest and activity in the field during the 60s, 70s and 80s, as witnessed by the very successful series of Annual Regional Meetings, coincided with increased Engineering activities, especially the Motorway Construction programme which introduced Engineers to problem materials such as Mercia Mudstone (or Keuper Marl as it was then known) and to relict solifluxion slides and thus made the Engineering fraternity aware of the shortcomings of their geological knowledge. Likewise, overseas activities brought Engineers into regions where their scant undergraduate geology courses provided no guidance to the geomorphological and ground problems they encountered.
Much of the Soil Mechanics applied in this era was of the classical (‘Terzaghian’) variety which was not only readily understood by geologists but, as eminent practitioners like Alec Skempton showed, could readily accommodate geological information. However, the era also saw the gradual development of Critical State Soil Mechanics and numerical methods, such as the finite element technique, to enable sophisticated mechanical models to be applied in practice. These developments usually came from sources where the geological education of undergraduates was purely cursory and hence, although in theory the new techniques are very capable of absorbing geological information, to the new breed of Engineer, geological information was not high on the list of priorities. The development of in-situ instrumentation, enabling parametric feedback from the ground profile has for many
