The Editorial Board of QJEGH is changing. Many of the Board members have reached the end of their term of office; their replacements attended a training session on the Allentrack on-line submission and review system last November. We have set ourselves several targets for the future, relating mainly to the aim of improving delivery of service; in particular, shortening response times throughout the review process, and giving potential authors more informative replies to supplement the automated responses generated by the system at various stages. Authors are reminded that the review process requires input from reviewers, board members and scientific editors, all of whom are volunteers with other jobs. Although our thorough approach inevitably makes the review process a slow one, we are addressing the avoidable delays and encourage authors to consider volunteering their services for review to spread the load more equitably and ensure returns as quickly as one would like for one’s own manuscripts. The one permanent staff member of the team who authors will meet in the review process is Helen Floyd-Walker. Helen is involved at all stages, and without her the process would not function.
Prospective authors whose first language is not English are strongly encouraged to keep submitting their contributions to us. If there is a concern about the standard of English of the manuscripts, it would be wise to use professional services to enhance the quality before submission and ensure not only that the narrative flows, but also that the scientific content is clear and accessible.
The Current Chief Scientific Editor (Eddie Bromhead) could not take office for ethical reasons until his Glossop Lecture had cleared the review and production stages. It appeared in print in the past year (Bromhead 2013). The paper discusses some issues relating to the residual strength of clay soils operative in landslides where a major part of the basal shear surface followed the stratification in a sedimentary sequence. Two further Glossop Lectures have taken place (Ruth Allington and Jim Griffiths) along with Paul Younger’s Ineson Lecture, which contains major contributions to the field of hydrogeology; all three are expected to be published in the journal in the coming year.
Jim Griffiths presented an inspired Glossop Lecture in November 2013 on engineering geology’s past, present and future. Under the heading ‘Feet on the ground’ he gave an erudite description of the role that engineering geology has fulfilled by successfully enabling a wide range of projects in civil engineering and mining. Increasing understanding of the properties and processes in geological materials has led to an intensification of the application of and confidence in numerical analyses. This, Jim warns, is potentially dangerous if the associated numerical simplifications are based on a significantly incomplete understanding of the ground model. There are gradually fewer problems encountered that are ‘unforeseeable’, and if things go wrong it is largely because these were ‘unforeseen’ and the result of an inadequate application of good engineering geology practice. We therefore need to continue to emphasize the importance of a thorough understanding and detailed interpretation of the geology and hydrogeology across the scales, from micro (sub-micron) to macro (landscape) scales. In some ways this complemented the previous year’s lecture from Ruth Allington, who took the audience through important aspects of extractive industry practice with particular reference to innovative work done by her firm, a leader in this field.
Engineering geology continues to form the backbone of the content of QJEGH. The understanding of geological history and the geotechnical processes that drove, and are driving, changes are important themes. These form the focus of the aspirations of the Editorial Board for future submissions. Our increasing understanding of the complexities of response mechanisms in geological materials leads to a situation in which it is difficult to see that one discipline alone can address the issues comprehensively. Multi-disciplinary approaches are increasingly common and these form stimulating environments where important new developments can be achieved. In the understanding of the landscape and what it contains in the way of hazards and resources, clearly material behaviour is an important theme, and so are the mechanics of the various processes, providing an environment of happy marriage between engineering geology and hydrogeology.
Edward Bromhead, QJEGH Editor-in-chief.
We are looking forward to receiving papers on all relevant aspects of the valuable contributions of engineering geology to society. We would particularly like to see more case studies being published that highlight the problems encountered and capture the expertise required to achieve appropriate solutions. Right from the start of QJEGH, major infrastructure projects provided the impetus behind developments in engineering geology and geotechnics, thereby providing the substance of the journal. It is anticipated that engineering geological findings from these projects will continue to fill pages in the journal, and inform the readership. In the UK, there are a number of such projects in planning, investigation, design or construction; for example, the HS2 railway, the Hinckley nuclear power station, CrossRail and fracking. Internationally, the number of projects is huge and varied; in China, for example, large-scale construction is continuing to take place and is pushing the boundaries of engineering geology applications. This is resulting in an increasing number of submissions from Chinese authors reporting on very interesting case studies, not just on engineering geological aspects of mining (Wu et al. 2013), but also detailing the scales at which geohazards have an impact on society. Although in the UK we experienced a five-fold increase in landsliding during 2012 this resulted in only a few hundred landslides, and this pales to insignificance when realizing that the Wenchuan earthquake resulted in 196007 landslides (Xu et al. 2013). Clearly, there is excellent work being reported, and access to this through English language journals such as ours will be extremely beneficial for international dissemination. Unfortunately, language remains a barrier and many interesting submissions have had to be returned, asking for re-submission once narrative and content are better accessible.
Tom Dijkstra, QJEGH assistant scientific editor (engineering geology).
All journals are working to improve their Impact Factors, and QJEGH is no different. The journal covers a broad field, and this is not readily recognized by the method employed to compute such factors. Authors are encouraged to follow established themes and give due recognition of earlier relevant publications in the journal, whether or not these contribute to computed Impact Factors. The breadth of the subject area encapsulated by engineering geology is captured by papers in the journal, with examples as disparate as stiffness of residual dolomite (Jacobsz 2013), soil abrasion for tunnel boring machines (Barzegari et al. 2013), desert engineering geology and geomorphology (Fookes et al. 2013), settlement in peats (Long & Boylan 2013), landslide monitoring (Gunn et al. 2013), the properties of specific deposits (e.g. the engineering geology of chalk; Bowden 2013) and advances in theory and analysis (e.g. numerical modelling of fractures; Wu et al. 2013). In addition, Number 4 of the past year saw the publication of a thematic set on the stone cycle and conservation of historical buildings (Cassar et al. 2013). Prof Cassar’s time on the Editorial Board has included not only the important and valuable task of master-minding this thematic set of papers, but also producing the Geological Society Special Publication No. 391 (Cassar et al. 2014). Growth in the shale gas industry will generate further insights into engineering geology. Although Younger’s Ineson Lecture provides a positive view of this process, there are contrary views, and the journal encourages submissions from all sides in the debate.
The variability of weather and its impacts were felt across the UK in the very wet summer and autumn of 2012. The UK is rather benign on a world scale, but then four deaths from landslide events occurred within a 12 month period, on the high end of the normal range for this developed country. It was a clear illustration that, although landslide distribution is embedded in geological structures and materials in the ground, landslide activity is almost exclusively a consequence of weather events or a sequence of them. Thus, climate change and its potential effects form an important area for continuing research and debate. Elsewhere, the effects of unstable ground were felt much more, and this was exemplified by the commemoration of 50 years since the Vaiont landslide by means of an international conference in Padova, and indeed, by the cover photograph for last year’s QJEGH. It will be remembered that this landslide and its effects on a large reservoir led to over 2000 fatalities, and shocks from this continue to rebound throughout reservoir and dam engineering.
In coming years, this journal will record major anniversaries in engineering geology and hydrogeology, such as the 50th anniversaries of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society (in 2014) and of the Aberfan coal waste tip landslide with its 144 fatalities (in 2016), an outlier in the otherwise mainly landslide-benign record of geological disasters in the UK. The Aberfan disaster triggered an increased awareness of the importance of the understanding of the engineering implications of our geological environment; and it strongly influenced the development of engineering geology courses at UK universities such as Leeds, Imperial College, Durham, Newcastle and Portsmouth. We encourage authors to submit papers to the journal to highlight these and other major events, as these continue to act as catalysts for enhancing and disseminating our experiences and expertise.
When submitting papers, potential authors should be aware that the Society offers an important Young Author award, open to an author or a co-author of a paper. The award this year goes to Linda Seward for her contribution to the paper titled ‘Remoulding of the Mercia Mudstone Group around CFA pile shafts’ (Seward et al. 2013). It is still too early to fully understand the impact of open access publishing on QJEGH content or standing, and the editors welcome correspondence on this subject from interested parties, which we will report on in the next editorial.
Eddie Bromhead & Tom Dijkstra
- © 2014 The Geological Society of London
