Design of the Future Mexico City Airport: Attaining Resilience in Soft Ground
The Lake Texcoco region to the east of Mexico City is famed for its deep lacustrine deposits of compressible clay, which amplify ground shaking during seismic events. The area is also gradually subsiding...
Turning Imagination Into Reality (part of "The House That LEGO Built")
Embracing the Bricks (part of "The House That LEGO Built")
Sustainability and Resilience in Transportation Infrastructure Geotechnics: Integrating Advanced Technologies for Better Asset Management
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, enumerates 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be achieved by the member countries...
Proactive Management of Landslide- and Rockfall-Prone Slopes: A New Program for Federal Land Management Agencies
Most people realize that the nation's transportation infrastructure is aging faster than federal, state, and local governments can manage with traditional methods. In fact, a national and international...
Paleoflood Analyses For Dam and Levee Safety Assessments: Was that Really the "500-Year Flood"?
What is paleoflood hydrology? How are paleofloods analyzed? What are common paleoflood results? What are the implications of paleoflood analyses?...
When Bridges, Roadways, and Dams Need Our Help: Innovative Techniques Can Help Save Our Nation's Critical Infrastructure
The nation's infrastructure is showing its age. The signs are obvious with structure distress, lack of functionality, and failure reported frequently over the last several decades. Specialty geotechnical...
NTSB Issues Preliminary Report on Florida Bridge Collapse (part of Infrastructure Solutions: Bridges Move Forward)
In late May, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary report about the March 15 structural failure and collapose of a partially-constructed pedestrian bridge in Miami....
Supporting A National Treasure: Spruce Tree House Alcove Arch Stabilization
Mesa Verse National Park, located in southwestern Colorado, honors the cultural significance of the fantastic cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people, who lived in the area from AD 600 to 1300....
Preserving the Past: Recovering the Destroyed Buddha Statues and Niches in Bamiyan Afghanistan
For millennia, civilizations have built monuments to honor their gods, leaders, or founding principles, and with time those monuments that still exist have become revered treasures. Take, for example,...
Instrumenting a National Landmark's Expansion: the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Art
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, located just north of the Lincoln Memorial on the Potomac River in Washington D.C., is currently undergoing expansion. Through a series of spaces that...
Glacier Skywalk: Foundations for a Canadian National Park Landmark
Jasper National Park, the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies, is located in the Province of Alberta, north of Banff National Park and west of Edmonton. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site...
Risky Business: Identifying an Acceptable Rockfall Standard
For many parts of the U.S. highway system, cut slopes in rock are as common as bridges and embankments. These cut slopes, as well as some natural ones, produce rockfalls that pose risks to highway conditions...
Stabilizing the Cliffs of Alcatraz Island: It My Be "The Rock," but it Still Needs Attention!
California's Alcatraz Island was described by some early explorers as an unusually lush rock sticking out of the sea. The rock on the island consists of shale and sandstone members of the late Mesozoic-aged...
Rock Glue Gets the Job Done: Reducing Rockfall Hazards along the G.W. Parkway
After a large rockfall damaged the road and disrupted traffic along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in 2002, the National Park Service was looking for solutions to stabilize the slope against additional...
Photogrammetry for Rock Engineering: A Snapshot of State-of-the-Art Rock Mapping
Generally speaking, photogrammetry is the science of turning photographs into 3D models. While flashy advertisements may convey the idea that it's as simple as pushing a button (e.g., on a drone remote)...
Borehole Geophysics: Tools to Characterize Rock Properties
Effective design and construction in rock requires characterization of the engineering properties of the rock mass, as well as any associated geological features such as joints, faults, and bedding planes....
Low-Gravity Experiments: Shear Testing Takes a Nose Dive
A major challenge to making celestial soil mechanics viable is to re-engineer the profession's toolkit to provide geotechnical solutions without the luxury of ex-situ and in-situ testing as we know them...
A Sunken Submarine Full of Mercury: Safe, Controlled Construction of a Counter Fill for Seabed Slope Stabilization at about 155 to 177 Meters
On December 5, 1944, with World War II still raging and peace in Europe still six months away, the German submarine U-864 set out on her maiden voyage on a secret mission to deliver strategic war supplies...
Eyes in the Heavens: Satellite Technologies in Remote Site Monitoring
Installation and maintenance of instrumentation to monitor geotechnical projects in remote locales is usually more challenging than sites in urban areas for both technical and logistical reasons. In most...
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