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...
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,"...
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...
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...
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...
Making It Work: Up and Over
Located at the heart of Salt Lake City's financial district, 111 Main is a 24-story, 501,455 sq ft Class A office tower that anchors a larger urban redevelopment project in the area....
Double Duty: Approach Structures
The new Sarah Mildred Long Bridge, which connects the cities of Kittery, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, features precast, posttensioned concrete, segmental box girder approaches in a stacked configuration...
Making It Work: Nontraditional Answers
One thousand Museum introduces a bold, new silhouette to the Miami skyline and has quickly become one of the highest-profile developments in the United States....
Making It Work: 'Unbuildable' Site
As the amount of space available for constructing new buildings in cities decreases, urban sites previously considered unattractive for development or simply unbuildable are seeing renewed interest....
Reliability-Based Design (RBD) For Everyone: (No Monte Carlo Simulation Required!)
In North America, the design of earth structures for transportation applications is most often carried out using load and resistance factor design (LRFD). In the U.S., the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications...
Micropiles Support the "Missing Link": Understanding Load Transfer in Challenging Subgrades
Authorized by Congress in 1944, the Foothills National Parkway partly traverses the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. Large sections of the parkway cross high ridges located...
The Present And Future Of Virtual and Augmented Reality In Geotechnical Engineering: This Technology Has Gone Way Beyond Gaming!
One of the greatest challenges with subsurface construction has always been our relative inability to visualize underground conditions that are often comprised of spatially variable soil and rock strata,...
Automated Model And Parameter Selection: Incorporating Expert Input into Geotechnical Analyses
Excavation for construction of MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, MA. This complex soil-structure interaction problem required advanced numerical methods and soil constitutive models. A) PLAXIS 3D model of...
A Combo Foundation Does the Job: Piled-Raft Foundation Design for a Supertall Skyscraper
Lotte World Tower is a 123-story, 555-m supertall skyscraper with a 6-level basement for retail and car parking located at Jamsil-dong in Seoul, South Korea. (Editor’s Note: For additional information,...
Basements On The Beach: Overcoming South Florida's Shoreline Excavation Challenges
The South Florida beachfront is awash with an ever-increasing number of high-rise condominiums. As land becomes scarcer and increasingly expensive, and building regulations change to require above-grade...
Connecting Continents: Challenges of the Eurasia Tunnel in Istanbul
The Eurasia Tunnel, the first bored tunnel crossing of the Istanbul Strait (Bosphorus) in Istanbul, Turkey, is a site that presents many unique challenges, including very poor ground conditions, unusually...
Geo-Resilience By Soil Improvement: Contrasting the Performance of Two Embankments during a Megathrust Mw 7.8 Earthquake
The west coast of Ecuador forms the eastern side of the Pacific "ring of fire" along the Nazca tectonic plate boundary (Figure 1). The epicenter of the Ecuador earthquake on April 16, 2016 (Mw 7.8), was...
Landslides Driven by Extreme Events: Can We Learn More from More of Them?
Extreme events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or major storms, typically cause thousands of landslides in mountainous topography over the course of minutes to hours. In the last few years alone, we’ve...
Geotechnical Aspects Of Coastal Impacts During Hurricanes Harvey And Irma: Logistical and Technical Challenges During Reconnaissance
As designers and managers for society’s infrastructure, civil engineers, including the geotechnical community, must understand and predict the most severe expected loadings from physical or environmental...
Design Criteria and Land - Use Practices: Is it Time to Consider Geo-Impacts of Wildfires?
Wildfires are extreme events with impacts that are notorious because of smartphone videos followed by news reports that feature sensational infrastructure damage and human suffering. The geo-impacts shown...
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