Evaluating the Energy and Carbon of Geotechnical Works: An Important Step in Developing Sustainable Designs
Engineering for sustainable development requires considering the triple-bottom-line of social, economic, and environmental factors associated with a project when developing the final design. Within geotechnical...
The Pipeline to Diversity and Inclusion in the Geoprofessions: Challenging the Profession to Increase Innovation, Profitability, and Future Sustainability
Diversity + Inclusion (D+I) is a term often used in the workplace, but its meaning is not well understood. People generally value the concept, but its nebulousness has kneecapped the movement. In fact,...
Resources to Enhance the Geotechnical Educational Experience
In 2016, I joined the ASCE Minnesota Section’s (ASCE-MN) inaugural infrastructure Report Card Committee at a time in my career when I was curious about the role civil engineering had to play in the overall...
Did You Know? Geostrata Is 20
Spring 2000 was the first issue of Geo-Strata (now GEOSTRATA). That issue included articles on academic-industry partnerships, implementing innovative technology, marketing advice from "The Old Rainmaker,"...
Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Dealing With Uncertain Ground
Tools for identifying and managing risk in geotechnical engineering projects. Risk is an inherent component of all types of projects, no matter the size or discipline. Geotechnical engineering projects...
Best Practices For Geotechnical Site Characterization: Have We Regressed from Decades Past?
The objective of a geotechnical site-characterization program is to determine soil and rock stratigraphy, in-situ pore water pressure conditions, and soil and rock properties for analysis and design of...
Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Are Design Professionals Liable for Failing to Anticipate the Effects of Climate Change?…
Climate change is the result of rising greenhouse gasses from a century and a half of development and industrialization around the world. The inability of the global community to reduce greenhouse gas...
Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Whose Risk Is It Anyway?
The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico was once the fifth-largest region in the world for manufacturing of pharmaceutical products, including many of the top global producers. In 2016, the pharmaceutical exports...
Soil Sampling at Sword Beach in Normandy, France, 1943: How Geotechnical Engineering Influenced the D-Day Invasion
When the World paused last summer to remember the 75th anniversary of D-Day, many of us were gripped by stories, both heroic and horrific, told about the Allied invasion of Normandy’s beaches. One of these...
Big Steps for Mankind: Extraterrestrial Sampling and Exploration 50 Years after Apollo 11
Between June 1966 and January 1968, four Surveyor missions successfully landed on the Moon, collecting invaluable scientific data required to support the coming manned Apollo missions. Central to the goals...
Creating Art AND Reducing Project Risk WITH 3D Modeling: Digital Insights Unearth Hidden Landscapes
Humans have always lived in threedimensional space, with senses that evolved for a 3D environment. So, it’s perfectly natural that people can more quickly, easily, and fully understand something when it’s...
Minnesota’s Story Through ASCE’s Infrastructure Report Card: We Can All Help
The COVID-19 pandemic caught everyone off guard, including university administrators, faculty, and students. Suddenly forced off campus in early March and quarantined in many different settings for an...
How Mentoring Can Chart Your Career Path with Intention and Purpose
Growing up in India with a father who is a mechanical engineer and a musician, and a mother who was like a fireball, elevating and inspiring everyone around her, I was unaware that my parents were my first...
Adaptive Infrastructure To Mitigate Future Climate Risk: Building Upon Our Geotechnical Engineering Heritage
It’s time to recognize that past extreme events may no longer serve as reliable proxies for the future. Current infrastructure design concepts rely on historical events, assuming temporal stationarity...
Inclusion as a Strategic Imperative: How One Engineering Firm Has Created Change from Within
Tackling inclusion and diversity in a business can seem like too tangled a knot to untie. Some think they must be the CEO to make a difference in this realm, and others think it’s too large of an issue...
Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Geotechnical Judgment
People use judgment in every aspect of their lives. We rely on our judgments to make decisions that can have consequences from small to large on ourselves and on others, sometimes with life-threatening...
Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Unraveling Foundation Uncertainty
Statistical Analysis Offers a Rational Approach for Controlling Foundation Risk in Design-Build Projects. For the past 20 years, design-build (DB) procurement has become the default for many transportation...
What Does Diggs Do For Me? Better, Faster, Cheaper Is the Goal!
For the past decade, the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) has been at the forefront of advancing geotechnical data management associated with its investment and leadership related to DIGGS (Data...
Our Geobusiness Future: BIG DATA, MACHINE LEARNING, AND AI
Have you ever stared out the window wondering how your company will operate in the future? What will your clients want? What will your team need? The Geoprofessional Business Association (GBA) convened...
A SAR Is Born: How a Cold War Era Technique Is Reinventing Deformation Monitoring from Earth’s Orbit
The space race gave birth to a remote sensing technique known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that could be used for everything from tracking militaries to mapping the surface of the moon, all the while...
Return to search