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The Ninth Glossop Lecture

Geology; its principles, practice and potential for

Geotechnics
M.H. de Freitas
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK
(e-mail: m.defreitas@imperial.ac.uk)

Abstract: Three themes are developed in this paper. The first deals with those principles basic to the
science of geology and thus to the use of geology in geotechnical engineering; namely, the principles
of superposition and uniformitarianism; their use is illustrated with reference to commonly occurring
geotechnical situations. Then the application of these principles in practice is explained, together with
the difficulties that follow if little thought is given to the demands they make for their proper use. Two
common causes for difficulty are considered; namely, using an inappropriate description and working at
an inappropriate scale. Finally, the potential geology has to open new areas of research is illustrated
with examples, ranging in dimension over almost 14 orders of magnitude, the largest involving regional
structure, the London Basin. The examples that follow are of progressively smaller volume: displace-
ments in landslides, the failure of crystalline rock, the response of mineral surfaces to contact with
water, the possible effects of strain energy stored in minerals, and the characters of silica gel, a material
that could influence and possibly govern the geomechanical and geochemical response of silicate
particles. Each of these subjects could lead to an understanding of geological materials that changes
the development of geotechnical engineering. Each is capable of becoming a scientific area to which
engineers refer for solutions to problems in ground engineering and guidance in the use of soils as a
construction material. In developing these themes mention is also made of the roots of engineering
geology in Britain, as these throw light onto the similarities and differences between engineering
geology and geology for engineers, and between engineering geology used in practice and that needed
to develop the subject. The greatest danger at present comes from the lack of education in practical and
theoretical geology for many who enter engineering geology; it is that which will do most to limit the
extraordinary potential for advances in geotechnical engineering that can be provided by geology.

Principles are the foundations upon which we build
those actions that lead to best behaviour; in our case,
correct results. They have been formulated from obser-
vation, logic and hypotheses, and tried and tested thou-
sands of times under dierent circumstances and by
dierent users. In the great majority of cases they have
not been found wanting but delivered a sound basis for
taking action and moving forward. Indeed, when they
have been found wanting, their lack of application has
usually revealed other principles hidden thus far. It is
therefore evident that established principles should be
both known and used, because it is perilous to ignore
them.
Two principles of geology are of common use in
geotechnics, uniformitarianism and superposition. Both
are concepts, neither is quantified by formulae as such,
yet both provide the substance upon which the tools of
mathematics, physics and chemistry can fashion quanti-
fiable relationships. Thus they provide the bases for
predictions that can reduce the uncertainty inherent at
most sites and the unknowns involved with the opera-
tion of many geological processes, particularly those
unseen that occurred in the past.
The origins for these concepts can be traced back to
the Age of Enlightenment, if not earlier. Nobody knows
why Leonardo da Vinci included a spectacular angular
Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology, 42, 397441
DOI 10.1144/1470-9236/09-014
unconformity in his painting Madonna of the Rocks
(c. 14911508); much has been written about this paint-
ing (for a summary see Nicholl 2004) and it is possible
that he painted what he dared not write, for at that time
its implications were heretical. Almost 150 years had to
pass before the light of reason flickered again, when
Nicolaus Steno (16381686), the Danish physician and
scientist, recognized that fossils could be the remains
of former living things and as a consequence viewed
layered rocks containing them as former sediments. It
was he who defined the principle of superposition as
seen in geology (Steno 1669) and who is now regarded as
the Father of Stratigraphy. Attitudes were changing
as the Enlightenment developed because his Tract was
published 2 years after his conversion to Catholicism
and his thinking did not prevent him from being
ordained 6 years later.
The Enlightenment was a period of extraordinary
intellectual and scientific curiosity that flourished from
the late 17th century, springing from the French philos-
opher and mathematician, Rene Descartes; it was his
famous postulate Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore
I am) that opened the floodgates of enquiry. Descartes
first rule was to accept nothing as true which I did not
clearly recognise as being so (Descartes 1637). Whereas
this philosophy grew on the continent into what was
1470-9236/09 $15.00  2009 Geological Society of London
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398 M.H. DE FREITAS
called Rationalism (i.e. deduction solely based on
reason) in Britain there developed what is referred to as
Empiricism (i.e. deduction based on experience). This
dierence was so fundamental that its reverberations in
education and training continue to the present day, as
highlighted by the diculties encountered with adopting
the reasoning for Eurocode 7: Geotechnical Design, into
British geotechnical practice.
The Enlightenment continued well into the 18th cen-
tury and facilitated the acceptance of the works of
Hooke, Newton, Coulomb and their contemporaries,
including James Hutton and William Smith. Neverthe-
less, a further 100 years had to pass before the remark-
able contribution of Hutton (17261797) would throw
further light on the evidence strata provided.
Others had seen peculiar strata before him (Tomkeie
1962) but Hutton recognized that the sub-horizontal
sandstones sitting on near-vertical slates and greywackes
(which we now know to be Devonian overlying Silurian
rocks) at Siccar Point, in Berwickshire, recorded the
relentless working of a natural machine, a geological
cycle: first sedimentation, followed by compaction,
folding, uplift and erosion, only to start again with
sedimentation, compaction, tilting, uplift and erosion,
and possibly more of the same after that, whose record
had been removed from the location by subsequent
erosion. The superposition of geological processes was
now beyond doubt, as was the sense of time it implied
(Hutton 1788). It was the development of stratigraphy
derived from the evidence of superposition that allowed
this sense of time to become a rational history of
geology. All engineering geologists are aware of the
contributions William Smith (17691839) made to that
development.
Smith was neither a geologist nor a natural scientist
but a mineral surveyor; he did not have an academic
background (for which he was derided) and it is not
surprising that he seemed to be unaware of the develop-
ment of Stratigraphy as we know it now (i.e. a study
for the description, explanation and correlation of
strata), by the German geologist Abraham Werner
(17501817) (see Laudan 1987). He was also unaware
that on the other side of the English Channel the French
anatomist and palaeontologist Georges Cuvier (1769
1832) and his colleague Alexandre Brongniart (1770
1847), the French geologist who coined the name
Jurassic, were undertaking similar studies of stratigra-
phy that also involved the use of fossils (which was a
novel and distinctive aspect of Smiths work) to reveal
the geology of the Paris Basin (Cuvier & Brongniart
1811). Likewise, he seemed not to know that the Belgian
geologist Jean-Baptiste Omalius dHalloy was mapping
and dividing the formations dHalloy was later to name
as Cretaceous. However, it was Smith who first made
geological maps on which exposures at separate loca-
tions were grouped correctly into outcrops of strata of
similar age and, with the aid of fossils, placed in their
proper stratigraphic sequence (Hancock 1977; Torrens
2003). The earliest surviving example of such a map is
dated 1799 (Forster & Reeves 2008), but there were
probably earlier versions, now lost; the earliest known
draft of Smiths much greater work, the map of England
and Wales, is dated 1801.
Smiths background allowed stratigraphy in Britain
to be brought to others outside the realm of natural
history, including engineers. A measure of the signifi-
cance of that achievement can be gauged from the fact
that the newly funded medal of the Geological Society,
the Wollaston Medal, to be used as its highest award,
was first given to William Smith (1831). In presenting it
the President, Professor Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge
University, described Smith as the Father of English
Geology and concluded his oration by recording that
this award was to perform an act of public gratitude
(Sedgwick 1831; note the reference to public).
Smith lived to see the creation of the Geological
Ordnance Survey in 1835 (a branch of the Ordnance
Survey), whose work eventually prompted the Geologi-
cal Survey Act (1845) that gave to the Survey a legal
basis for completing the geological survey of Britain and
Ireland, and allowed Henry de la Beche to bring some
order to assessments of the nations mineral wealth.
The new subjects of superposition and stratigraphy
were revealing the need to include considerable time into
the subject of natural history; this was quite unexpected
and much eort was directed to understanding its
implications. The great debates that followed between
Neptunists, Vulcanists and Plutonists over the essence of
minerals, rocks and the fossils they contained, and the
related arguments of the Catastrophists and Uniformi-
tarians over the origins of these materials and of the
landscapes in which they are found, produced many
advances to science, the most significant being the
concept of uniformitarianism; a concept some of its
more enthusiastic disciples took as a Law (Hallam
1988).
Uniformitarianism was eventually seen to be not so
much a Law as a method of thinking. Many strands of
geological evidence were used to weave the pattern of its
logic from the original threads attributed to Hutton and
included contributions from the major names in 17th-
and 18th-century geology; a revolution in geology was
occurring (Wilson 1972). It was not until the magisterial
work (Principles of Geology, Lyell 1830) of Lyell (1797
1875) that a sense of the evidence, seen overall, emerged.
The Principles demonstrated that reasoning in geology,
of the sort recognized and used at present, had devel-
oped in Britain in time for the industrial revolution
(c. 17501850); it facilitated the design and construction
of shafts, mines, tunnels, canals and railways, and
associated mineral extraction.
The use and application of these two principles in
engineering practice remains a subject of research and
discovery, as illustrated by two recent works, one
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
devoted to landscape evolution (Gallagher et al. 2008), a
subject of great influence in the initial debates between
Catastrophists and Uniformitarians and of immense
relevance to ground investigation, and the other on fluid
flow in structures (Wibberley et al. 2008); both subjects
on which the pioneering thinkers of the 17th and 18th
centuries could only speculate. Such research, firmly
rooted in the principles of geology, is most likely to make
an enduring contribution to geotechnical engineering.
In practice, it is probably uniformitarianism that is
the principle first applied by most engineering geologists
when attempting to understand the ground, because it
helps create a model that accurately represents the 3D
geology of a site. Aspects of this principle will be
considered first. The use of superposition normally
comes later when the mechanical, hydraulic and chemi-
cal aspects of the ground have to be added to the
geological model, so as to obtain a framework for
predicting the response of the ground to engineering
work.
Uniformitarianism
This principle directs its user to consider that the
present is the key to the past; that processes that can be
seen operating at present are most likely to have been
those operating in the past. This can be put another way:
the products of geological processes unseen at their time
of formation were probably created by processes seen
forming similar materials and structures at present.
Uniformitarianism is thus the basis for reconstructing
former geological environments of a site. This is of
absolute importance to geotechnics because usually it is
only the products of those processes that are available
for study, and it is from those products that the pro-
cesses that aect the response of the ground to engineer-
ing have to be deduced. Much design in geotechnics is
associated with either avoiding or counteracting the
detrimental aspects of former and present geological
processes operating on site (e.g. preventing either the
reactivation of a landslide or creation of a new one, or
avoiding the excessive development of lateral pressures,
critical hydraulic gradients, softening and relaxation,
and so forth) as well as coping with the products (i.e. the
materials) these processes generate. Rarely are the geo-
logical processes that form a site witnessed as ongoing
events; most of the data used to deduce the formation of
a site come from the geological products revealed by
mapping, pitting, trenching, boring and testing, either in
the field or in the laboratory. So it is essential to be able
to interpret these products in terms of the processes that
formed them originally and changed them subsequently.
Figure 1 illustrates an everyday example of such
interpretation and the use made of uniformitarianism: a
rock scarp, exposing horizontal bedding, is broken by
a V-shaped scar and has a scree slope at its toe. Will it
be safe to build elsewhere at the foot of that scarp? The
399
Fig. 1. Investigation of wedge failure; a simple example of the
application of uniformitarianism.
scar and the scree are both products of geological
processes but what were the processes that caused them?
Uniformitarianism allows us to say, with considerable
certainty, that slope failure was the initiating process,
and what is more it allows details of that process to be
discerned. The scarp is obviously defined by joints that
are influential in dividing the rock mass into sections
that have a kinematic freedom of movement towards the
free face (i.e. the scarp face). Their separation gives a feel
for the scale at which the rock mass should be studied.
The scree provides some evidence of the range of block
sizes to which the mass can reduce over the distances
travelled and of the boundaries within the mass (bedding
and jointing) that have allowed this reduction to be
achieved. The angle of the scree slope from the horizon-
tal provides a first measure of the angle of friction for
such an incoherent assemblage. The angles of the two
surfaces forming the scar allow their shear strength to be
back-calculated; the volume of the wedge that has
moved allows its weight to be assessed (a vertical force),
and thus the normal and shear force components of that
vertical force coming from the weight of the wedge onto
the two surfaces that bound it.
All this can be said with a high degree of certainty
because someone has seen it happen before, probably
elsewhere; accurate observation, aided by measurement
and recorded by case history are the necessary imple-
ments for the proper use of uniformitarianism. Once a
process has been seen and properly recorded the experi-
ence is available to everyone so that others can later
know they have seen something similar; all this adds to
the certainty of the deductions that can be made.
Such observations and measurements also reveal
much of what may not be possible to deduce from the
site. In the example just described there may be good
reason to suspect that the forces that prompted failure
were derived from gravity alone, but that could be
checked; contributions from water pressures in the rock
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400 M.H. DE FREITAS
mass, time-dependent changes in the quality of the rock
that progressively weaken it, seismically derived accel-
erations and anthropological causes might all have to be
assessed to complete an understanding of the original
field observations.
So the advice to anyone thinking of building else-
where at the foot of the slope in Figure 1 is clear: this
slope can fail and has failed, therefore have the stability
of the material from which the slope is made, and of the
mass of the slope itself, assessed by a person competent
to do that; be prepared to invest in methods of drainage
and support that will ensure the slope remains stable.
Consider installing some appropriate form of instrumen-
tation to warn of either any movement that is occurring
or circumstance that is developing, such as rising water
pressure, which could reduce stability, and arrange for
data from these instruments to be monitored regularly
by those who know what these data mean. Finally, have
a plan of action for the occasion when any of these
observations suggest cause for concern.
The same train of thinking is followed when the
geological processes that formed the materials found on
site have to be deduced, so as to safely extend the scant
information from points of ground investigation (i.e. the
locations of trial pits and boreholes, geophysical lines
and the like) across the site. Only then can the facts for
a site reveal what remains to be known. Practical
preparations can be made to deal with the geology that
is known, such as with the materials encountered by the
ground investigation, but ground between the points of
investigation, which remains unknown, will best be
predicted by reconstructing the environment thought to
exist at the time of its formation, and its subsequent
history. An honest assessment of the confidence with
which such reconstructions can be made on the basis of
the evidence available may also suggest it prudent to
couple this advice with an ability to provide flexible
responses within a contract for construction, so as to
manage unexpected conditions. The reconstruction of
sedimentary environments at the time of deposition of
the Lambeth Group in the London Basin has been
widely used during the design and construction of major
ground works in the recent development of Londons
Docklands, and is a good example of the principle
of uniformitarianism at work in geotechnics (Page &
Skipper 2000).
Uniformitarianism influences every scale of inter-
pretation of ground conditions, from what can be seen
in hand specimens to the risk register for ground works.
What, then, should be done to ensure that every geo-
technical professional is familiar with the tenets of this
principle and their operation? The answer to that is
simple: fieldwork that studies geology, as much and as
often as possible. It has long been said that the best
geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks; to that
can be added the most sediments, most soils, and most
geomorphology, and all in dierent climatic settings.
Lucky is the engineering geologist who has also wit-
nessed failure of the ground and seen the organization
and acceleration of displacements within it, until its
limiting state is reached and catastrophic failure reveals
the width, depth, breadth and completeness of the trans-
formation associated with a comprehensive destruction
of strength. It is often the speed with which the imbal-
ance between forces that disturb and those that resist is
resolved that is so memorable.
For many, such an experience of failure can only be
obtained second hand, but the study of ground that has
failed compensates for much that has not been seen at
first hand. Every engineering geologist should acquire
knowledge of failed ground by studying it in the field
when opportunity exists, as with landslides or subsid-
ence of various sorts, and by gathering a personal library
of classical case histories (see James & Kiersch (1991)
and the International Journal of Geoengineering Case
Histories, started in 2008).
Superposition
This principle asserts that if a total can be divided into
parts, then that total can be obtained from the sum of its
parts. The trick here is to correctly identify the parts and
to know how they can be summed to create the total.
The layers upon layers observed by da Vinci, Steno and
Hutton were physical examples of the principle; the
parts could be distinguished clearly, especially as they
were unconformable; however, the problem for each of
these observers was explaining how the parts could be
summed. The obvious explanations seemed extraordi-
nary and the implications such thoughts had for an
understanding of the natural system that formed the
total, revolutionary. That problem can still face every-
one who uses the principle today because defining a
sequence of events solves only half the problem; the
sequence then has to be explained.
Despite these diculties the overriding advantage
oered by superposition is its ability to solve complex
problems that can be broken into smaller and simpler
parts, each capable of an independent solution that can
be summed to provide the final solution. The allure of
such an analytical method for mathematics is obvious
and it is in a quasi-mathematical sense that the principle
is used in engineering geology.
Figure 2 illustrates the borehole logs of two vertical
holes sunk on the slopes of a river valley at locations
destined to become the left and right abutments for a
concrete dam; the site is in southern Africa, the left and
right banks slope at 13( and 35(, respectively, and a
perennial river occupies the valley floor. Solid geology
consists of sandstones of Permian age dipping almost
horizontally across the valley, being exposed at the top
of the slopes but covered with a veneer of superficial
material on the sides of both slopes. There are three joint
sets, their traces on a vertical section aligned along the
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 2. The use of superposition when interrogating a vertical profile.
dam axis being 80( (J1) and 30( (J2) towards the south
and 26( (J3) towards the north; sets J1 and J3 generally
strike along the axis of the valley, and are very tight and
tight, respectively, whereas set J2, which strikes diago-
nally across the valley, is open. Bedding is locally open
and contains infilling. The designers want to know the
depth of weathering to expect.
The descriptive log (c. mid-1970s) comes from core
obtained using rotary drilling methods with water flush
and TNX bits; it gives some indication of depth of
weathering but presents a logger with the problem of
describing weathering in a resistant, fairly uniform
material of the sort provided by quartz-rich sandstone.
Further, core can only be used to describe what is
recovered, thus material lost in drilling and gaps, in the
form of open bedding and joints, remains something
to conjecture. Here Total Core Recovery (TCR), Solid
Core Recovery (SCR), Rock Quality Designation
(RQD) and water returns from drilling have been
measured to quantify the brokenness of the ground
recovered, in the hope and expectation that these also
reflect reasonably well both the susceptibility of the rock
to disintegrate on drilling and the location and fre-
quency of fractures in situ. Each of these measures,
together with the descriptive log, can be thought of as
being a part of the total, and so the distribution of
their values with depth oers some part of the solution
to the problem of defining the depth of weathering.
When each of these measures, or parts of the whole, is
considered first on its own and then added to its closest
relative to form a sub-total (e.g. TCR with SCR, and
SCR with RQD, etc.), the process of superposition has
begun. When the sub-totals so formed are added to
produce a summation that can be compared with the
descriptive log, a picture of the whole results, from
which conclusions can be drawn, and superposition has
been accomplished. To confirm the likely correctness of
this exercise it is prudent to add the results of in situ
tests, which in this example consisted of borehole geo-
401
physical surveys to assess the character of apertures
between bedding surfaces and along joints, and packer
tests to measure their hydraulic capability.
Consider borehole (BH) A; the rock here is in good
condition, being largely recoverable and settling to
around 80% RQD in the vertical direction (i.e. Good),
probably as good as can be obtained from a medium-
bedded sandstone. Water returns are rarely less than
50% but improve once the RQD reaches 80%. All this
happens at about 10 m below ground level. It should be
noted that the scree is fairly coarse.
BH B, which penetrates the slope dipping at 13(,
presents a dierent profile. The solid geology is almost
the same as seen in BH A although the scree is much
finer. Material is missing down to about 10 m and the
RQD in the vertical direction only gradually improves to
80%, with no clear improvement in water returns associ-
ated with this value; indeed, they only reach just over
80% at about 16 m below ground level.
The two profiles are very dierent and yet they are on
the slopes of the same valley; could it be that these slopes
are of dierent ages or perhaps formed by dierent
mechanisms of mass movement across and within them?
The river can only cut down, so how might the ground
shown in Figure 2 respond to a slot cut at 90( to the
plane of the section? These are very pertinent questions
and all follow from applying a form of superposition;
not a single calculation has been performed. Indeed,
they improve the question that was originally asked
because depth of weathering is not the critical issue.
The issues to be resolved for design will relate to what
these slopes contain, how they are working under their
existing environment of normal and shear stresses, in
terms of eective stress, how they will respond to
unloading as the foundation excavations are sunk, how
they will react to reloading under the weight and other
forces from the dam, and to what depth and level of
hydraulic eciency should any cut-o through them be
taken.
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402 M.H. DE FREITAS
The principle of superposition, invaluable though it
is, does not initiate the question; that has to come from
the observer, and if the wrong question is asked an
inappropriate answer might be forthcoming. Likewise, if
the wrong boundaries are chosen for partitioning the
problem, and these can be intellectual boundaries (i.e.
thought boundaries) just as well as physical boundaries,
an inappropriate exercise in superposition may follow.
Even when these aspects of the solution have been dealt
with correctly, the sequence of superposition used need
not explain how either the components of its sub-totals
or the sub-totals themselves are able to relate to
each other. For example, the circumstances that relate
solid and total core recovery either to each other or to
water returns from drilling are rarely known unequivo-
cally.
Thus although observation need be all that is
required to reduce a problem into parts, observation
alone is usually insucient to explain how the parts are
able to come into coexistence. As a consequence, it is
easy for the parts to be summed incorrectly. This is one
of the most basic diculties in applying geology to
geotechnics and the cause of much frustration and
failure in researching the link between geology and
geotechnical properties. Indeed, this summing of the
parts may well have been the basic reason why Terzaghi
failed to systematize the treatment of engineering
geology; a subject dear to him since his youth, but so
elusive he described it as being slippery like a reptile
(quotation from Terzaghis letter to Mr. T. E. Mao of
the China Bridge Co., 26 June 1945, cited by Goodman
1999).
Geological materials are not only complex but are
usually made and fashioned by processes neither con-
trolled nor seen by humans. Further, the parameters
used to describe them are usually inadequate for captur-
ing the interplay of physical and chemical processes
operating within them, which are often neither quanti-
fied nor even described. This generates great pressure to
rely heavily on experience. Terzaghi felt compelled to
warn of the dangers of this when he wrote:
When utilising past experience in the design of a new
structure we proceed by analogy and no conclusion
by analogy can be considered valid unless all the vital
factors involved in the cases subject to comparison
are practically identical. Experience does not tell us
anything about the nature of these factors and many
engineers who are proud of their experience do not
even suspect the conditions required for the validity
of their mental operations. Hence our practical
experience can be very misleading unless it combines
with it a fairly accurate conception of the mechanics
of the phenomena under consideration (Terzaghi
(Preliminary Report on the Settlement of the Charity
Hospital Building in New Orleans, Louisiana, April
9, 1939) cited by Goodman 1999).
Terzaghi was 56 at the time and clearly saw the
unthinking reliance on experience as a major problem
that had pervaded the profession. His warning should
be remembered when using classifications, for useful
though classifications are in relating either a material or
mass classified to the experience of others who have
worked with similar materials or masses, the user rarely
knows the crucial mix of variables that make the behav-
iour of the material or mass being classified similar to
the experience of others. This hazard increases with
increase in the complexity of the materials and masses
being classified. In short, classifications are an invalu-
able aid to knowledge but no guarantee of understand-
ing. Evert Hoek was disappointed at the lack of
development in understanding rock behaviour following
the establishment of the HoekBrown criterion for
assessing rock mass strength (Hoek 1994).
To achieve an understanding of how a problem
should be divided into parts and how those parts should
be summed, it is usually necessary for a quantitative
attempt to be made at explaining the processes thought
to be at work. That is why soil and rock mechanics,
together with hydrogeology, are used most eectively
when superimposed upon site geology; only then can
their respective roles be appreciated and used, so that
the design and analyses of ground works, and the plans
for their execution, are made fit for purpose.
Figure 3 illustrates the operation of such superposi-
tion in ordinary practice. First comes the problem,
usually arriving in one of three forms, as follows:
(1) it has made itself known (e.g. as with a landslide);
here the problem is fairly easily defined; or
(2) it has to be identified (e.g. as with settlement
adjacent to an excavation where dewatering was
employed); here there is more than one possible
cause and the question to answer is how can the
cause or causes be identified?; or
(3) it has to be predicted (e.g. as with the load ground
beneath a foundation can sustain for a given
settlement). Here many causes and processes and
mechanisms have to be suspected as being able to
occur and the question becomes which are capable
of occurring and most likely to do so?
The problem, however defined, will be linked to
either a process or mechanism, or a product. It will also
be linked to some boundary beyond which the problem
is not considered to go; this will be both a physical limit
and an analytical limit to the problem. Identifying the
problem and its limits correctly is the key to success in
engineering geology, as good practice, by itself (i.e.
acting according to the book) will not suce. This is
because, in scientific terms, most of the ground problems
that have to be addressed are heterogeneous, time-
dependent, irreversible systems that do not possess clear
boundary conditions and require a considerable degree
of detective work to isolate. Examples of how carefully
problems have to be investigated are provided by the
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 3. Problem solving; a complex example of the use of superposition.
early case histories requiring an analysis of slope failure;
for instance, Terzaghis identification of the problem at
the Rio Alpha site of the Cubatao Powerhouse in Brazil,
where the movement of c. 600 000 m3 was threatening
the penstocks of the power station (Bjerrum et al. 1960;
Goodman 1999), or the investigation of sliding in 1952
at Jackfield in Shropshire (Skempton 1964) or that at
Waltons Wood (19611962), where residual strength on
an existing shear surface was first appreciated (Early &
Skempton 1972), and of the slopes at Sevenoaks in Kent
(Skempton & Weeks 1976). Such care is still needed, as
witnessed by the stabilization of the tower at Pisa (Potts
2003) and is an ever-present requirement for ground
engineering.
Once the problem has been identified, relevant para-
meters can be sought for the process involved to be
analysed (Fig. 3), but now related variables, such as total
and eective stresses and operative values for friction
and shear strength at the stress levels concerned, have to
be considered. Obtaining these values normally depends
heavily on the samples collected and their location
relative to the seat of the problem. Somehow, values are
obtained and these generate data. The accuracy and
completeness of these data need to be considered prior
to analyses and this requires a feedback to sample types
and locations, especially if the problem involves a site
where stress history has changed (Fig. 3). It should not
be forgotten that some materials take a long time to
respond to changes in load; indeed, the higher than
expected values for Ko in the London Clay beneath
Terrace Gravels, remarked on by Simpson (2010), could
be the result of rapid undrained unloading by erosion
403
during the deposition of the terrace deposits some tens
of thousands of years ago (Chandler et al. 2010).
After this, some interpretation of the outcomes
obtained is necessary and these may then be used to
solve the problem, either directly or with the aid of other
conclusions (Fig. 3). The problem then becomes know-
ing the contribution that these parts make to the total
solution.
Looking at Figure 3 four aspects of common practice
become apparent.
(1) The whole process is one superposition on
another, crossing a wide range of dimensions and
involving dierent sorts of data being compared in
quantitative and qualitative ways.
(2) There are no direct pathways from one established
position to the next; for example, it is not possible
to go directly from a defined problem to the
parameters required; thought involving broader
issues is necessary.
(3) Under these circumstances it is imperative that the
descriptions used for the materials and their envi-
ronments (e.g. pore pressure, vertical stress) are
suitable for their purpose.
(4) The range of dimensions involved (laboratory
samples to bedding thickness or joint separation)
means that the scales at which problems are seen
and analyses are undertaken are important.
It is also clear that students who are taught only
testing techniques and analytical methods whilst at
college are likely to enter industry with an incomplete
view of the thinking required to solve a geotechnical
problem.
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404 M.H. DE FREITAS
Superposition, like uniformitarianism, influences
every scale of interpretation of ground conditions. What
should be done to ensure that all geotechnical profes-
sionals are familiar with the tenets of this principle and
their operation? As superposition means adding one
form of knowledge to another, proficiency is normally
not achieved by work conducted in isolation; the input
from others is required. Looking back over a long and
distinguished career in geotechnical engineering, Mller-
Salzburg (1976) complained of the diculty of achieving
this: it is not sucient to bring two experts from
dierent fields to work together. Since they even speak
two dierent languages so they can hardly understand
each other, progress must be limited. Or, as the late
and much missed Peter Vaughan (Professor of Ground
Engineering at Imperial College London) was apt to
remark: They understand what you are saying but dont
know what you are talking about!
Attempts to overcome this problem cause geology to
be taught to engineers and the mechanics of soil, rock
and groundwater flow to be taught to geologists. How-
ever, this interface is delicate and easily broken. It is
made workable most pleasantly when geological field-
work, in which soils, rocks and groundwater, together
with geomorphology, can be observed and analysed by
an engineering geologist in the company of a geotechni-
cal engineer, both of whom share the satisfaction of
understanding the ground. Under these circumstances
accurate observation and measurement can be harnessed
to quantify natural responses to change. It is clear that
Terzaghi made much personal progress by working in
exactly this way (Goodman 1999).
The use of these principles
The principles of uniformitarianism and superposition
come without a rulebook but their correct application is
not without rules. These rules will influence the success
of practice but have not been written down; the book
that does this will be the first real text on engineering
geology and perhaps the nearest thing to what Terzaghi
was seeking. Knowledge of these rules would fill the gap
that Morgenstern described when reviewing the subject
in comparison with developments in soil and rock
mechanics (Morgenstern 2000) and may even provide
what Knill was striving to express by core values (Knill
2003). Meanwhile, case histories provide the advice
closest to such a text, albeit on a case-by-case basis and
often leaving the reader to distil the general rules the
cases illustrate. That is why collections of case histories
by themselves, despite being immensely useful, leave the
reader feeling there is something more to it than that.
The answer to those who ask this question is: There is,
but it will take some time to arrive.
The geology needed to link geological products with
geotechnical properties has revealed itself to be much
more dicult to establish than first thought. The
insights of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based
on the steep part of the learning curve for a new subject,
raised hopes and expectations for contributions from
geology that seemed so sure to come to fruition, yet have
proved much harder to harvest within the economics of
ground investigation, design and construction. That
harvest will come when rules for the use of superposition
are known, as such rules will govern good practice.
Practice
The inertia generated by precedent has remarkable
endurance and many aspects of current practice, includ-
ing those in science and engineering, are as they are
because they have always been so. If the system works
why change it? It is often the case that only when a need
for change becomes imperative that a will to change
emerges. Geotechnical engineering is no dierent, and
the loss of life from slope failures at Aberfan (Anon.
1967) and Sau Mau Ping (Hong Kong Government
1972, 1977; Knill et al. 1976) are just two of many
examples where catastrophe forced a major change in
working practice, the former changing the design of coal
tips and similar structures in Britain and the latter
creating the formal acceptance of the need to control
geotechnical work in Hong Kong. Engineering geology
is no dierent, and in Britain its origins are still firmly
visible in its practice and thinking.
The roots in Britain
The roots of engineering geology can be found within
geology, physics and chemistry and their application to
geological processes, the products they form, their mech-
anical properties, and their behaviour during construc-
tion. So many are these contributions that any choice of
names from such a history has to be selective, but as
described above, most engineering geologists will recog-
nize the ready use they make of the ideas of James
Hutton, William Smith and Charles Lyell, together with
the contributions from Archibald Geikie (18351924).
Likewise, much of the mineralogy used in geotechnics
arises from the systematics of James Dana (18131895)
and the structural principles used at site scale can be
traced to the pioneering studies of Albert Heim (1849
1937) and Hans Cloos (18861951). Of course, there
would be no subject of engineering geology had there
been no attempts to engineer the ground and from the
endeavours of many scientists and engineers in this field
came the contributions of Charles Coulomb (17361806;
see Coulomb 1776), Henri Darcy (18031858; see Darcy
1856), Alexandre Collin (18081890; see Collin 1846),
and William Rankine (18201872; see Rankine 1862),
and the extraordinary experience of ground engineering
gained by Isambard Brunel (18061859; see Rolt 1957;
Vaughan 1991). The roots in Britain therefore contain
national and international components.
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Just as there are many who could be recognized for
their contribution to engineering geology so there are
also many opinions on when engineering geology came
into existence as an identifiable subject (Fookes 2005).
Much can be made of the first publication to describe
. . . use the term . . . explain and so forth, but that alone
reflects and records the personal experience of the indi-
vidual involved. Once that individual is gone there
remains only their writing to ensure the subject will
survive, and when that is forgotten too the work is lost
until either rediscovered or reinvented.
Another criterion for establishing the birth of a
subject is when it is taught to others. Teaching requires
the distillation of personal knowledge and its application
to the interests of the listeners, who invariably wish
to be taught the established practice of others and not
the untested and novel opinions of the lecturer. Thus
teaching requires the ability for both the subject and
its presenter to provide answers to listeners questions;
it is a vocal and intellectual experiment conducted in
the lecture theatre, akin to the practical experiment
conducted in the laboratory, and a considerably greater
task than quietly recording, in writing, personal experi-
ence. In Britain this teaching is associated with the
life and times of Dr Herbert Lapworth (de Freitas &
Rosenbaum 2008).
Herbert Lapworth (18751933) instigated and deliv-
ered two courses of lectures to what were then the
students of the Institution of Civil Engineers entitled
The Principles of Engineering Geology (Lapworth
1908), based on his practical experience.
In his Introduction to these lectures Lapworth wrote:
The question then arises, whether a civil engineer
should possess a detailed knowledge of practical
geology. . . . It may be argued . . . that the consulting
engineer may always call on the geological expert . . .
but obviously a consulting engineer cannot do this on
every occasion. Moreover, . . . the geological expert
cannot be expected to see with the eye of the engineer.
Much of Lapworths course consisted of field
geology, in particular geological mapping, using geologi-
cal maps for predicting the position of boundaries and
volumes of materials, and integrating ground investi-
gation with existing geological knowledge. All this
should sound straightforward to the modern reader but
its novelty and timeliness in 1908 can be judged from the
fact that Lapworth was awarded the Telford Gold
Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers for his
contribution. His courses laid the foundations for the
much longer course he developed and delivered to
students at Imperial College in London and the Univer-
sity of Liverpool; a course that built on the works of Sir
Archibald Geikie (Outlines of Field Geology, Geikie
1877) the engineer W. H. Penning (Engineering Geology,
Penning 1880) and Lieut.-Col. R. F. Sorsbie (Geology
405
for Engineers, Sorsbie 1911) and continues to the present
at Imperial.
Was Lapworths course engineering geology or was
it geology for engineers? The dierence is significant
because of the connotations now attached to these
descriptions.
The roots of the problem
It is obvious that in the early days no one gave much
thought to what they called the subject, engineering
geology or geology for engineers; either name would
suce as those outside the subject and those inside it
knew what they meant. In those days there was no
dierence between the two.
Lapworths work was considered at the time to be
research in character because it explored a new applica-
tion of established geological principles: are they appli-
cable, would they work, do they help?, to which he was
able to answer yes they are and yes they do. However,
engineers seek a degree of certainty upon which to base
their predictions of performance and although the best
engineers also seek an understanding of the mechanisms
involved, it is that work upon which outcomes can be
relied that is sought by all. Thus once the value and
certainty of using some aspect of geology has been
demonstrated, be it the use of dips and strikes, or the
calculations of depth and volume that come from them,
or the benefits of map reading or the need to establish
conceptual models, these and similar matters of
research interest when first studied, engineering
geology to those at the time, slip into the certainty of
geology for engineers. Gradually two subjects began
their separate existence where one had been before.
Two unintended consequences follow this develop-
ment.
(1) Both subjects, although strong in their own way,
are weakened by blurring their dierence to those
who finance their use and support their develop-
ment. Many clients buy-into the perceived cer-
tainty provided by geology for engineers, but
others, including consultants and research agen-
cies, perceive advantage in understanding better
the uncertainties in the subject. The two should not
be treated as one.
(2) The illusion of certainty created by an idealization
of both site geology and analytical solutions appli-
cable to it leaves many graduates of engineering
and geoscience unaware of the one fact in this
subject known with certainty; namely, that the
ground on site is never fully known, even after
engineering work has been conducted within it.
The development of geology for engineers in Britain,
enshrined in textbooks from Blyth (1943) to Mathews
et al. (2008) owes much to the inheritance from
Lapworths research. Indeed, so powerful is the foot-
print of this subject upon the profession in Britain that
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406 M.H. DE FREITAS
the First Glossop Lecture of the Engineering Group of
the Geological Society of London was dedicated to
Geology for Engineers (Fookes 1997).
What, then, is engineering geology? The Inter-
national Association for Engineering Geology and the
Environment states that Engineering geology is defined
in the statutes of the IAEG as the science devoted to the
investigation, study and solution of engineering and
environmental problems which may arise as a result of
the interaction between geology and the works or activi-
ties of man, as well as of the prediction of and develop-
ment of measures for the prevention or remediation of
geological hazards. It then goes on to describe what this
embraces. The problem here is that what engineering
geology is has not been separated from what engineer-
ing geologists do. It is reasonable to expect that engi-
neering geologists do engineering geology, and Knill
(2003) has provided a good account of what that means
at present. Engineering need dictates the geological work
required and established geological tools are used to
allow engineering to be conducted safely, economically
and competitively. This situation is unlikely to change
and oers employment that many welcome.
However, an unfortunate consequence of engineering
geology developing in response to engineering need is
the dierence in time required for engineering and
geology to provide a solution to a problem. The time
scale for overcoming most problems in engineering is
short and tends to result in an engineering solution
rather than a geological solution being used. Time for
development is hard to find outside universities, but for
engineering geology to grow these days the driving force
needs to be the potential geology has for developing
engineering.
The geology that has potential in geotechnical engi-
neering is the study of geological controls of geotechni-
cal parameters; that is, research into the properties of
rocks and soils, both as materials and masses, and into
the origins of those properties, and the controls on them,
within the geological processes and environments in
which they function. It is research into the origins and
controls of these properties that is largely missing at
present, for without them engineering can only respond
to the properties measured and use these as a guide to
selecting an engineering solution from the present menu
of tried and tested actions. If the origins and controls of
geological properties are not known it is impossible to
predict how a material or mass can be changed to
engineering advantage; once they are known great
advances follow. An example of this is provided by the
benefits that came from grouting and its related aspects
of ground improvement as the fundamentals governing
the processes were understood. The behaviour of the
ground and the fate of its mobile constituents became
manageable, so permitting industrial sectors specializing
in hydraulic structures and fluid control to develop and
flourish.
It is the study of what controls the behaviour of
ground and its response to change that separates the
engineering geology in need of development from the
engineering geology z geology for engineers now
practised in industry. We may compare the development
of Herbert Lapworth and Karl Terzaghi. They were
born within 8 years of each other, 1875 and 1883,
Terzaghi being the younger. Neither were geologists,
both were engineers. Lapworth attended lectures on
geology from his father whilst at college, and emulated
him during his professional life, being awarded the
Murchison Fund by the Geological Society for his
research into graptolites. Terzaghi also attended courses
in geology whilst at college, was enthralled by the
geology of mountains and, as a young man, would have
been on a geological expedition to Greenland had it not
been for illness. Both Lapworth and Terzaghi used
Geikies Field Geology (it was the first paper Terzaghi
wrote; he translated it whilst a conscript) and both
were scandalized by the diculties ignorance of ground
conditions create for engineers and contractors alike.
Lapworth started to teach, passed on what he had learnt
and then moved into full-time consulting, starting his
own practice in late 1910, when he was 35 (Lapworth
1911). When Terzaghi was 34 he secured the post of
Professor at what was then a rather obscure and impov-
erished university, and returned to the intellectual life of
experimental research (Goodman 1999). He wanted to
know why his materials behaved as they did, and within
a year the seeds of soil mechanics were sown.
Examples of the thinking required to develop engi-
neering geology are illustrated in some of the thought
clouds of Figure 3. Real examples of the potential
geology has to develop engineering geology in ways that
will cause engineering to benefit from its advances are
described later; however, before leaving practice two
rules regarding current practice in the application of
uniformitarianism and superposition must be addressed.
As mentioned earlier, neither of these principles comes
with rules as such, but rules are required for their
application to be most beneficial.
Rule 1: use an appropriate description
In 1970 a Working Party of the Engineering Group of
the Geological Society of London published its Report
on The logging of rock cores for engineering purposes
(Anon. 1970) and so started a process for systematically
recording and describing soil and rock in Britain, using
an agreed vocabulary; this is now seen in the British
Standard 5930:1999 (BSI 1999) and its amendments for
compliance with Eurocode 7, as British Standard BS EN
ISO 14688 (BSI 2002a,b) and 14689 (BSI 2003). A
common vocabulary is essential for the subject, as at this
level of description the user is attempting to generate
word pictures of the materials seen. Originally these
were almost the only pictures available, and they remain
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 4. Porosity; a lumped parameter.
so for the great majority of the logging undertaken, even
though photographs soon began to accompany such
logs and are routine for major works. It is interesting to
consider the advantages photographs bring; essentially
they help convert a word picture to some level of reality
and allow the user to consider aspects of the samples
recovered not described adequately for their purpose
by the descriptive logs. Photographs are an everyday
example of one sort of description enhancing another to
provide a more appropriate description for the needs of
the user.
Other sorts of descriptions are required and provided
by tests and measures of various sorts; for example, the
Standard Penetration Test, Cone Penetration Test,
moisture content with depth and consistency limits, and
so forth; Figure 2 gives other examples. All these are
attempts to grasp the relevant property linked either to
a particular type of ground or depth on site; something
well developed in petroleum geology. This can be done
best when the descriptor used is directly related in a
mechanical or chemical way to the property sought; that
is one of the reasons why measurements of shear-wave
characteristics relate so well to aspects of strength in
soils and rocks: both involve the relative displacement
of particles by physically generated forces of known
magnitude and direction (McDowell 2002).
No rules exist for deciding the appropriate descrip-
tion for a particular purpose. As a result, many investi-
gations are frustrated not only by a lack of data but also
by the inappropriateness of the data provided. This
immediately becomes apparent the first time descrip-
tions have to be used as a basis for either explaining or
predicting physical and chemical properties of the
ground. At this point the word picture and photograph
almost completely fail to help their user other than
acting as a bridge to experience. At present there is no
direct way of converting the descriptions normally used
in geotechnics into material properties.
Figure 4 illustrates this problem using the frequently
calculated value of either porosity or voids ratio. Five
samples are illustrated, each made of the same solid and
each having 10% porosity, equivalent to a voids ratio of
0.11. That value does not disclose either the position or
the make-up of the voids. Intuition might suggest which
sample is strongest under uniaxial loading, which is the
stiest under triaxial loading and which is the most
permeable in the horizontal direction, and modelling
407
might improve this intuitive assessment, but it is clear
that an accurate measure of porosity alone, useful
though this is, will not provide the answer.
Porosity is an example of a lumped parameter
inasmuch as one number comes from the summation of
many aspects of the feature being measured that consti-
tute the whole. Such parameters can be divided into
those that measure what is there and those that measure
its response to a known stimulus. Porosity, density and
saturation are examples of the former and seismic vel-
ocity, bulk modulus, strength and conductivity are
examples of the latter. All these descriptions of material
developed in what was called materials technology, now
known as materials science, because they are parts of
established analyses of mechanical behaviour. Many of
these descriptors have been employed in geotechnics so
that similar analyses and predictions can be made for
soils and rocks as are made for other materials, despite
the fact that soils and rocks have a petrology unlike that
of other materials.
Some of these descriptors may, by good fortune, be
appropriate for the work in which they are to be used;
however, if an inappropriate description is used, any
understanding coming from its use will be limited in
ways that may not be known to the user. For example,
in a material whose solid particles also contain pores,
as in volcanic ash, or in chalk where the particles are
porous skeletal remains of former organisms, or in floc-
culated clays, a single value for porosity is inadequate
for most purposes without knowing which porosity is
being measured. The diculties created by compressible
particles, as porous particles would be, for an under-
standing of eective stress, was first explored in 1960
(Skempton 1960) and remains a source of complexity
(Coop et al. 2004). Fortunately for soil mechanics, the
particle compressibility is usually far less than the skel-
etal compressibility and the simple rule for eective
stress (
' =

u) serves well; this need not be so in rock
mechanics (Lade & de Boer 1997).
Lumped parameters carry a further problem: because
their value is often the summation of more than one
relationship their value plotted against another variable
(e.g. porosity v. depth or vertical load) can contain the
eects of other parameters that are also changing with
that variable (e.g. pore size with depth). Figure 5 illus-
trates this relationship for a compressible material
whose pores decrease in size with increasing vertical load
(e.g. increasing depth of burial). A 3D plot is required to
illustrate this but when the results are compressed onto a
2D plot of porosity v. vertical load, scatter results.
Scatter is telling the user not only that there is variability
in the measurements but also that there could be some
other parameter(s) involved requiring the descriptor
being used to be improved.
This diculty is compounded when the processes
governing the relationship between a lumped parameter
and the variable against which it is being compared also
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408 M.H. DE FREITAS

Fig. 5. Porosity and pore size for sediment under increasing

vertical load.

change; a common example comes from sediment that

has been buried and then uplifted and eroded, and so
unloaded. During burial the pores of all sizes reduce in
volume, some more than others depending on their size
and shape. When unloading occurs the material now has
a fabric inherited from its loading. Some pores may
return to their original size and shape as if elastic, but
others may not; further, dierent forms of porosity Fig. 6. Appearance in plane-polarized light of the 13th-century
stone used at Salisbury Cathedral and its 19th-century replace-
might develop in the form of fissures and open bedding, ment (modified from original by Hamm, in Butenuth et al.
features commonly seen in most overconsolidated clay- 2004).
rich sediments.
As most soils and rocks encountered in civil and
mining engineering have experienced both loading and
unloading they will have the eects of unloading super-
imposed on those of loading. Most of the existing
descriptions have limitations restricting their use as tools
for interpreting geological processes and history and,
thus, there is a constant need to develop new descriptors
suitable for the tasks involved (Mitchell 1991). There is
Fig. 7. The second cycle of wetting for a sample of the
great scope for developing descriptors that provide a 13th-century stone at Salisbury Cathedral showing the steps
signature for a material that is both unique and can be seen in the first cycle of wetting and repeated in the third cycle
interrogated, as illustrated by Figures 69. of wetting (modified from Butenuth et al. 2004).
Figure 6 illustrates two building stones from the
cathedral at Salisbury: the original from which the
cathedral was built in the 13th century and its 19th-
century replacement, used in places where extensive
repairs were required. The original is a bioclastic quartz-
itic limestone formed from fragments of quartz, shell,
the tests of forams, coral and similar debris of the sort
found in warm coral seas, together with faecal remains
(peloids), all ranging in size from 0.06 to 0.6 mm and
forming a grain-supported framework of particles within
a matrix of fine calcareous mud that forms a micritic Fig. 8. Curves of average values of water uptake up to the first
cement. The limestone is of Late Jurassic age (Portlan- change in rate for the 13th- and 19th-century stone.
dian), the Tisbury Glauconitic Member of the Portland
Sand Formation. Its replacement is also a bioclastic be selected and why did the durability of the 13th- and
quartzitic limestone of Late Jurassic (Portlandian) age, 19th-century stones dier so greatly?
the Chilmark Oolite Member of the Portland Stone Basic features of the materials are recorded in Table
Formation (Bristow & Lott 1994, 1995). The 19th- 1; the other measurements made and details of this work
century replacement was now in need of replacement have been given by Butenuth et al. (2004). It is obvious
whereas the 13th-century material continued to be serv- that no answer to questions of durability will come from
iceable, and, as no further supplies of either the original these petrological descriptions, nor will a basis for
Tisbury Member or its Chilmark replacement could be selecting a replacement stone. Other tests were con-
located easily, a new supply was required. How was it to ducted to measure pore size distribution and strength
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 9. Distribution of the time to the first change in sorption
rate measured using the technique described.
but the basis for selection of a replacement became more
confused as more data were acquired.
As part of these studies the response of the rock to the
presence of water was measured; not water absorption
in its traditional sense (Brown 1981) but the uptake of
water as vapour (i.e. as oxygen and hydrogen in the
form of tri-atomic water). This requires simple but
extremely well-controlled conditions including a known
degree of dryness to start with, provided in this case by
drying specimens over the desiccant P2O5 (see Butenuth
et al. (2004) for the experimental details).
Figure 7 illustrates the signature obtained with time
under a relative humidity of 100%; it has two unexpected
features: the curve is not smooth but contains steps, and
this behaviour is repeatable, the steps occurring at the
same time and being of the same magnitude. These steps
reflect the operation of dierent processes within the
material, initiated not by external changes to the sample,
such as dierential loading, but from within the sample
itself; that is, the sample doing what it wants to do in
response to its ability to take up water in a constant
environment. Thus to understand better the response of
the material to water these processes need to be investi-
Table 1. Basic characters of the stones illustrated in Figure 6
Feature
Porosity (thin section)
Intergranular
Typical size
Intragranular
Typical size
Total
Porosity (Hg)
Specific surface (m2 g
1)
Dry bulk density (Mg3 m
1)
* For a 50 lens.
409
gated. The subject is called sorption kinetics and being
associated with kinetic responses (i.e. those with time)
the values obtained are applicable to the boundary
conditions and environment under which they were
measured, both of which must be carefully defined and
scrupulously observed. This is research that needs to be
completed but the results obtained showed that the first
step measured by the technique described revealed the
greatest dierence between the behaviour of the two
stones (Fig. 8), and the variation of that first step for a
number of samples tested provided a comparison
between the two stone types (Fig. 9) beyond anything
that could be created from the data in either Figure 6 or
Table 1.
Better descriptions of rocks and soils are required
than those available, especially as sediments and sedi-
mentary rocks can now be seen, mechanically, as mem-
bers of the same spectrum (Coop 2007), but the
development of these descriptors is an area of research
that has been neglected. The limitations resulting from
this lack of basic research have in part been compen-
sated for by linking descriptions of the ground to its
performance as measured by in situ instrumentation (see,
e.g. Hoek et al. 1998), a variation on the observational
method promoted by Peck (1969). However, as both
Terzaghi and Peck continually reminded the geotechni-
cal community, as does Hoek (1994, 1999), these semi-
quantitative methods are supposed to be temporary
until a better understanding of the ground, based upon
knowledge of what is happening, is available. It is,
unfortunately, the way of the world to forget the reason
for a shortcut once the shortcut is in place, and a
dangerous situation is developing where the response of
rock and soil is being increasingly modelled by numeri-
cal methods whose outputs cannot be linked to real
processes known to occur in the ground.
Rule 2: use an appropriate scale
The scale at which ground is studied usually diers from
that at which it is recorded and to accommodate this
dierence various summations and idealizations are
required. A geologist studies the face of a trial pit at 1:1
Original stone Replacement
1115% 1823%
0.0005 mm 0.00050.03 mm
12% 125%
Beyond resolution* Beyond resolution*
1217% 1925%
1831% 2529%
2.003.72 using N 1.89 using N
1.862.19 1.762.2
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
410 M.H. DE FREITAS
scale, where 1 m of face equals 1 m of ground, but may
record it at 1:10 so that it occupies 10 cm of space on a
sheet of paper. For this it may be necessary to group
similar materials exposed in the face together so as to
reduce the number of items to be recorded. Often this is
done without the geologist knowing either how the
resulting unit of ground will behave in response to
changing loads upon it or how the engineer will use the
information so generated in a quantitative way. Simi-
larly, the engineer may have little if any knowledge of
the summations made by the geologist and must accept
what has been delivered in the record as being what is in
the ground at 1:1 scale. Thus the subject of scale creates
an interface between geology and engineering at which
significant errors of judgement can occur. Ideally, the
geologist responsible for logging in the field should liase
with the engineer using the data gathered so that ele-
ments of design can be appropriately defined before
further time and resources are devoted to analyses, final
design and construction. This ideal is not possible when
only records are available for design, as often happens.
Problems raised by scale are not new. Terzaghi high-
lighted the diculties that can be created by small-scale
geological structures to foundations for hydraulic struc-
tures (Terzaghi 1929), Skempton described the impor-
tance of palaeo-shear surfaces for the stability of slopes
(Skempton 1964), and Rowe comprehensively reviewed
the influence of small-scale structures in soil (Rowe
1972). The eect is always the same: small-scale features
have an influence on large volumes of ground that is out
of all proportion to their size.
However, the search for small-scale structures must
not be at the expense of larger-scale structures; structures
that cannot be revealed in the exposures provided by
boreholes and trial pits. Folds, faults, thrusts, dykes, sills,
sinkholes, swallow holes and subsidence are examples of
the features that might not be seen with these forms of
investigation. Such features, if present in the region, can
normally be found recorded on maps of 1:25 000 or
1:50 000 scale. They represent data gathered from the far
field that have been seen somewhere other than the area
of the site or volume of ground being studied (i.e. the
near field). The far field represents the accumulation of
huge amounts of data, not all of which need be of direct
concern but all of which provide windows into the
geology of the region in which a site is situated. Such data
should inform the near field because the far field demon-
strates that the feature(s) in question are present and
prompt those investigating a site to ask are they here?
The importance of scale has been recognized across
soil and rock mechanics, with the concepts of mass and
the material from which it is made being the basis for
adjusting a geotechnical value that can be measured in
the laboratory on an intact sample of material to a
value that is representative of the mass that it forms
(Cunha 1990), a procedure now described as scaling-up
(for examples, see Fleckenstein & Fogg 2008).
These problems have been given further impetus by
the use of numerical modelling in ground engineering
and its requirement for a value. However, to provide a
value it is necessary to ask a value for what? Geology
is at the heart of answering these questions, as it
provides the basis for dividing the ground into represen-
tative portions of similar character, called Represen-
tative Elemental Volumes (REVs). Given this premise
it is self evident that some rules should be established
for working at the correct scale, but there are none;
geologists have to resolve this for themselves.
Thus it is useful to recognize two elements of raw
geological data that motivate decisions in the field; one
is size, the dimensions of the feature to be described and
recorded, and the other is the reduction in size to be used
to represent it (i.e. scale). Scale drives the decisions
governing what is grouped together; the portioning of
the ground. In the field the fundamental portion is the
mappable unit and this can be anything, a thin bed, a
collection of beds, a weathering zone, a fault, and so
forth, depending on the scale used for mapping. Thus a
geologist chooses a scale that is suitable for what has to
be mapped or logged in the time available, then maps or
logs what can be seen at that scale. Because of this
circularity in the logic it is essential to define the start for
this deductive process, and that has to be governed by
what needs to be known.
For example, when creating a geological map for
Britain, the Geological Survey considered the strati-
graphic Formation to be a mappable unit at a scale of
1:10 000 because there are good geological reasons for
grouping this mass of strata together, and so grouped it
can be conveniently separated, in most cases, from strata
above and below it. The London Clay is one such
Formation; a mappable unit. At that scale there will be
many lithologies included within the Formation, includ-
ing clay, silt and sand. Where these lithologies occur as
similar types (e.g. silts with laminated clays, or clays
with silt partings) they can be used to divide the Forma-
tion into Members, and distinctive beds that make useful
markers within Members can be recognized as Beds.
Furthermore, because the Formation is bounded by time
it forms a chronostratigraphical unit (see Powell 1998).
For the British Geological Survey, the London Clay
Formation is a Representative Elemental Volume of
British stratigraphy. Much smaller volumes are required
for most geotechnical purposes.
Many clients fail to appreciate that when a ground
investigation has insucient resources to study the
ground, the vertical profile so obtained will probably be
portioned and grouped in ways that are not best suited
for later use in design and analyses. The way the ground
is grouped and divided becomes of crucial significance
when the logs of boreholes, trial pits and other investi-
gations are the only evidence available for establishing a
model of the ground. At that stage, interpretation is a
function of how the various dierences in the ground
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
have been grouped. This in turn aects the way material
will be correlated across a site. The logic will be to join
similar materials, thus a model can be obtained that
appears to be reasonably based on fact but overlooks the
summation processes that have been undertaken at the
mapping and logging stage to create portions of similar
character.
This is particularly true when dealing with profiles of
deeply weathered material, as encountered in and
around the tropics, especially in metamorphic rocks,
where micaceous layers can be altered to clays, and even
more so in igneous rocks, illustrated by the pioneering
work in Hong Kong of Ruxton & Berry (1957). Their
descriptions were summations at a large scale and suf-
ficient for the needs of the concept being demonstrated
(core stones in granite), but were found later to be
insucient for engineering design and analyses (Martin
& Hencher 1986). This is because igneous intrusive
masses have a complex sequence of superimposed pro-
cesses, each creating its own product; first the intrusion,
usually with shearing oriented at 45( to the vertical
(strongly suggesting that the material had little if any
shear strength when intruded); these shear zones are
often altered by hydrothermal processes during the later
stages of intrusion as crustal water in the surrounding
host rock and from the crystallizing magma is mobilized
by the geothermal gradient generated within and around
the intrusion. Many of the intrusions now exposed at
ground level were those parked for some reason at
c. 1015 km below ground level and are only encoun-
tered now because of uplift and erosion. By this time
the intrusion is brittle and the stresses stored within it
are expressed as jointing. Such fractures provide access
for circulating ground water and so facilitate the
agents of subaerial weathering, which superimpose
their eects on the hydrothermal alteration previously
developed.
Many intrusions are not single events but have
ascended into the crust as a sequence of smaller events,
intruding each other and coalescing into a large intru-
sion when seen at a small scale. All this makes the
weathering of igneous rocks particularly dicult to
describe and quantify. Many attempts at suitable group-
ings have been made since the work of Ruxton & Berry,
in the form of indices to better describe a weathered
material (e.g. Lee & de Freitas 1989), and likewise many
classifications have been proposed to cope with a weath-
ered mass; notable contributions being those of the
Geotechnical Control Oce (1988) and the Geological
Society of London Working Party Report (Anon. 1995),
and the papers associated with that publication (Cragg
& Ingman 1995; Hencher & McNicholl 1995). The geo-
technical decisions associated with weathering require
the best possible links between the microscopic, petro-
logical, and the macroscopic, mapping, scales, as illus-
trated by Irfan (1996); these take time to obtain, they
can rarely be obtained cheaply, and it is imprudent to
411
Fig. 10. Representation of a regularly jointed rock by an
equivalent transversely isotropic material (after Goodman
1989).
economize on their acquisition in an attempt to achieve
savings at the ground investigation stage of design.
Once a geologist has grouped materials together that
are more similar to each other at this scale than to
material above or below them, to define a unit, that
unit will inevitably be considered as homogeneous and
have an REV set of values. Goodman (1989) illustrated
this well with two examples from a mass of horizontally
jointed rock (Fig. 10). Homogeneity may be adequate
for representing certain situations but the user should
remember that it is possible to obtain a similar value for
stiness from other combinations of material and joint
stiness. Although converting a discontinuum to a con-
tinuum may oer a satisfactory step for analyses, the
continuum so formed oers an insucient description of
the discontinuum it contains; unfortunately, there is
nothing about the value so obtained that allows the
uniqueness of the ground to be recognized. Further,
such a value from the example just described would not
be adequate for representing flow of water through
fissures whose apertures govern permeability and are a
function of normal and shear stress upon them, nor for
any geotechnical process, such as grouting, that depends
on the particular character and location of such fissures.
The lesson is clear: the problem to be solved and the
processes being analysed should drive the scale to be used.
There is no advantage in working at the wrong scale.
Although there are no rules governing this practice
there is one approach that always rewards the user and
could be considered as a rule for good work; namely,
that every problem should be accompanied by a cross-
section drawn in the relevant direction, which for
ground water will be in the direction of the maximum
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
412 M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 11. The basic section and its overlays.
hydraulic gradient, at a scale where H = V; that is, where
the representation of 1 m horizontally is the same as that
for 1 m vertically. Such a section can usefully be con-
structed in five stages as follows.
(1a) For profiles where weathering is not the dominant
feature: ground level and basic lithostratigraphy
showing the approximate age in years across the
major boundaries, especially between bedrock and
drift, so as to impart a sense of the time incorpor-
ated in the ground profile, together with the geo-
graphical limits (or footprint) of the engineering
work or problem.
(1b) For profiles where weathering is the dominant
feature: ground level and basic weathering, show-
ing the state of alteration that has occurred, its
location and its volumetric presence, so as to
impart a sense of the variation in the ground
profile, together with the geographical limits of the
engineering work or problem.
This first and most basic section is the geological
foundation upon which everything else must be hung.
The subsequent parts of the section are superimposed on
this basic section (tracing paper overlays are best) and
can be as follows (Fig. 11).
(2) The basic lithologies (sand, gravel, clay, sandstone,
etc.) and/or weathering products; descriptions
should be used in preference to classifications, so
as to carefully disentangle confusions arising from
the lithostratigraphy and weathering grades.
(3) The basic hydrogeology (water levels, heads and
where they are measured) and hydrostratigraphy
(aquifers and aquitards).
(4) The anthropological component of the ground
especially drains, sewers, backfilled service
trenches, basements, old foundations, wells, shafts,
tunnels, made ground and so forth.
(5) The mechanical properties measured in situ (e.g.
CPT, SPT, permeability, etc.) or obtained from the
laboratory, plotted at the locations from which
they were measured or from where the sample
from which they came was collected.
Only after these digests have been assembled and
overlaid is it prudent to start assessing how the ground
will behave; that is, to start zoning it in terms of its pre-
sumed geomechanical or geo-environmental properties.
Practical experience suggests that any part of the
ground likely to govern a process being analysed (e.g. a
permeable horizon or a weathered zone) should be
scaled so that 1 m of the material is represented by no
less than 1 cm in absolute length on the section or log,
unless it is a surface, such as a sliding surface, when a
line will suce, no matter what scale is being used. Thus
the centimetre would represent 1 m of such ground at
1:100, etc.
Only when this basic section has been constructed
where H = V is it safe to use sections where the vertical
scale is greater than the horizontal, and any conclusions
drawn from working on them should be mapped back
onto the H = V scale section. This can be easily
forgotten by geologists whose education was founded on
course work at college using sections where the scales are
not H = V, as with the maps from the Geological
Survey. Convenient though that may be for representing
large-scale geology it does not represent the real world.
Neither design nor analyses should be completed on
anything other than sections drawn at H = V scale.
From this it will be appreciated that it is not easy, indeed
in most cases it is probably impossible, to view on a
computer screen a representative section of ground at
the right scale for partitioning the ground into units of
similar character. This type of work needs sheets of
paper and in the larger oces these can be produced
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 413

Table 2. Common ills to avoid

Item Danger Possible remedy

Little opportunity for studying
geology in the field
Little opportunity to create and
test geological models using site
data
Lack of time to digest geological
detail
No physical contact with the site
Few opportunities for geotechnical
training
Increasing use of software for data
handling and analyses
Use of tick-boxes to show
completeness of work
Legislation replaces use of science
and/or engineering; actions
become prescribed
The most critical weakness, causing
blindness in both field and oce and an
inability to function as a geologist
Reduces ability to think and act
scientifically as an engineering geologist,
and hinders design of ground
investigation and its interpretation
Vulnerable to making major mistakes
unless experienced in relevant geology
Relying entirely on the judgement of
others, which might be wrong
Cannot see site geology with the eyes of an
engineer. Problems for a designer not
seen
Increasing separation from real world with
real data and real unknowns
Easily becomes a derogation of
responsibility for those aspects of the
work so covered
Nature governs the ground not the law,
and situations will be missed that should
have been seen
Attend field trips provided by geological
societies, etc., regional or local groups,
training companies and local colleges
In-house mentoring by senior sta and/or
attendance on courses providing the skills
required, and evening lectures by civil,
mining and water engineers
Line manager. Standards required v.
complexity of task. Old head on young
shoulders?
Visit site, inspect cores, use photos, air
photos, and Google Earth
Line manager; knowledge needed v.
education in soil and rock mechanics, and
hydrogeology that provides it
Define on paper the rudiments of data
manipulation by software
Link tick-boxes to real work for which the
standard is controlled and the completion
can be verified
Use professional status (as when chartered)
to ensure the duty of technical care for a
client is exercised

with the aid of computer-assisted design (CAD) soft-
ware; when this is not available the seemingly old-
fashioned methods must be used, as there is at present
no suitable substitute.
The use of these practices
Decisions to be made on the scale at which to work and
the description to use require judgement that calls on the
personal relationship developed between a geologist and
the ground in question. Every automated intervention,
especially tick boxes and software, designed to oer a
geologist predetermined choices so as to assure uniform-
ity, consistency and quality of work, interferes with the
development of that relationship. Such procedural
assistance can provide valuable help to companies striv-
ing to deliver a common minimum standard from many
sta; however, as explained, it is easy to describe inap-
propriately and to work at the wrong scale; thus these
actions driven by management are best used after the
basic scientific decisions have been made. Geologists
who experience diculty relating to ground they have to
study do not need software and tick boxes but further
field experience. Some geologists are well acquainted
with company procedure but they neither know why
they are working in this way nor consider whether this
way is suitable. Their judgement has been impaired and
the decisions they make will be vulnerable to mistakes at
such an early stage in the design process that the
consequences of them are only seen when they become
evident on site. Table 2 lists some current and common
ills to avoid.
Further, removing from geologists the freedom of
judgement in practice restricts their ability to contribute
to research because the procedures being followed
prevent them from recognizing, in both the field and
the laboratory, those things that point to the need for
better understanding. That undermines the potential of
geology to be a driver for research in geotechnical and
geoenvironmental engineering.
Potential
Returning to the premise that engineering geology is a
study of the geological controls of geotechnical para-
meters, it is appropriate to illustrate the potential
geology has for achieving advances of benefit to both
geotechnical engineering and the use of soils and rock in
construction. Six examples will be described ranging
over 1314 orders of magnitude of length, from
ngstrms to kilometres; this is an enormous range and
in itself illustrates the range of problems geology can
address.
The London Basin; the behaviour of a region
The concept of a London Basin emerged from the maps
of William Smith (1815) and George Bellas Greenough
(1820), to describe the body of strata of Tertiary and
Recent age beneath London, sitting above the Chalk
and forming an accumulation elongated along an axis
that has, in general, an eastwest direction. The Chalk
can be seen exposed to the north of London in the
Chilterns, dipping gently to the south, and to the south
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414 M.H. DE FREITAS
of London in the North Downs, dipping gently to the
north. A simple cross-section oriented northsouth sug-
gests a basin of deposition with the Chalk as its base-
ment. Smith included the basin in his westeast section
of 1817 from Snowdon to London (Sheppard 1917). The
Geological Survey was aware that the geology beneath
London was not as simple as that, as detailed mapping
had been in progress since 1861 and the correlation of
strata was not always straightforward (Whitaker 1872).
Furthermore, Chalk crops out at Windsor in the west,
c. 5 km from the edge of its main outcrop to the north
near Maidenhead, creating something of a geological
and topographical anomaly, the latter being utilized for
fortifications since the time of William I (c. 1070) by
reason of its elevation above the surrounding alluvial
plain of the River Thames. There were also smaller but
largely unexplained structures mapped in the east by
Woolridge (1923, 1926) and later by Woolridge &
Linton (1939), and across London boreholes revealed
basement rocks of Palaeozoic age overlain unconform-
ably by strata of Jurassic age, which in turn are uncon-
formably covered by strata of Cretaceous age.
Nevertheless, in 1947 the basin was still presented by the
Survey as a simple downwarp (Sherlock 1947). In the
late 1960s considerable surveys were undertaken as part
of oil exploration across southern England and by the
1990s the change in understanding of the structure of the
area was so great that a completely revised account was
required (Sumbler 1996). Geophysical work and further
drilling have proved beyond doubt that the crust
beneath the London Basin has a long geological history
of folding, tilting and faulting (Ellison et al. 2004). An
aspect of this tectonic history of overriding significance
to geotechnical engineering in the London Basin is the
location of a broad tectonic boundary running basically
eastwest, beneath the London Basin. It originates from
movements in the Variscan orogeny during and after the
Carboniferous, and being a line of crustal weakness has
been reactivated in various forms periodically since then.
It separates crust to the north that had a long history of
stability (the Anglo-Brabant massif) from that to its
south that entered a phase of extension, subsidence and
subsequent uplift.
Two aspects aecting the development of London are
the success with which ground engineering can be
accomplished in the London Clay and the hydrogeology
of the Chalk.
The London Clay is a Formation of Eocene age and
occurs throughout the region; it is used extensively for
foundations of all sorts and is the stratum through
which many of the deeper sections of the London
Underground have been bored; it is mainly a sti to firm
clay but contains horizons of silt and sometimes sand.
Beneath it and to some extent protected by it are the
Reading, Woolwich and Upnor Formations of the
Lambeth Group, and the Thanet Sand Formation; these
collectively form sediments of the Palaeogene Period. In
the London Basin they cover the Chalk, a major aquifer
beneath London of which the water levels and stored
water reserves are now recovering from over-pumping
and pollution beneath the capital.
Geotechnical and hydrogeological work in these For-
mations could be aected by past reactivation of faults
at depth, because faulting can divide the basin into
compartments able to move by dierent amounts verti-
cally, relative to each other. Should that have happened,
neither the London Clay nor the aquifers beneath it
could be considered to have lateral continuity; there are
implications for ground engineering if that is so. Much
engineering has been completed within the London Clay
Formation and as a consequence considerable banks of
data, storing records of its geotechnical behaviour, have
been accumulated in company and public records; like-
wise for the hydrology of the Chalk and water supplies
derived from it. The value of such data for geotechnical
engineering is clear because the subject relies so heavily
on experience; however, the value of that experience
depends on the confidence with which it can be used.
That confidence is eroded if the data from one location
cannot be used at another because the body from which
it comes is not a lateral continuum. Dierences from
place to place in a continuum can be explained as
gradual change but that need not be so in a discon-
tinuum; here an abrupt change, as can occur across
faults, is expected. Thus the question arises, Given its
history, is the London Basin compartmentalized?
There are many lines of evidence relevant to answer-
ing this question, of which a few will be mentioned here,
starting with the known structures within the basin.
Figure 12 illustrates some of the near-vertical structures
known for the London Basin, and should be compared
with Figure 13, which illustrates other possible locations
based on the positions of tributaries of the Thames and
drawn on the presumption that the rivers are located on
the trace at ground level of faults at depth.
Figure 13a illustrates the tributaries of the River
Thames, including the lost rivers of London (Barton
1992), Figure 13b the lineaments that can be drawn from
them, and the fault pattern that emerges if the pre-
sumption upon which this construction is based is
correct. Some confirmation of this pattern is provided
by the way the postulated faults bound the chalk
domes shown on the Water Resources Board map of
the Chalk surface in the Regents ParkMarylebone area
north of the Thames, and the CamberwellDeptford and
South GreenwichChislehurst areas south of the
Thames (Fig. 14). Further coincidence is shown by the
rectangular nature of the drawdown of water level
shown on the Environment Agencys ground water
level map for the Chalk in 1996, centred about Regents
Park; hardly a cone of depression (Fig. 14). A further
coincidence occurs between these speculated faults
and the position of deep erosion features discovered in
the London Clay and filled with sand and gravel ( in
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 415

Fig. 12. Known near-vertical structures in the London Basin (from Woolridge 1923, 1926; Woolridge & Linton 1939; Water
Resources Board 1972; Carter & Hart 1977; Ameen 1995; Ellison et al. 2004).

Fig. 14. The coincidence of position of postulated faults and

known anomalies. Anomalies from Water Resources Board
(1972), Environment Agency (1997), records for the Victoria
Line, London Transport Board (1970), Wakeling & Jennings
(1976) and Berry (1979).

Fig. 14) as shown in the records for the Victoria Line

Fig. 13. A fault pattern for London postulated from the trace of
tributaries of the River Thames (after Barton 1992; Thompson
1997): (a) the tributaries; (b) the resulting postulated fault
pattern. Arrows and Grid references may be used for compar-
ing (a) and (b).
tunnels of the London Underground (London Trans-
port Board 1970), by Wakeling & Jennings (1976) and
by Berry (1979) (see Massey 1999).
It has been suggested that these erosion features
could be the remains of open pingos developed when
periglacial conditions existed in the area and frozen
ground prevented the more general dissipation of high
hydraulic heads in the Chalk and Palaeogene at depth
(Hutchinson 1980); faults could provide the hydraulic
conductivity for such pressure heads to be relieved by
upward flow, so supporting pingo development along
their trace at ground level (Fig. 14).
These supposed fault traces are circumstantial evi-
dence for faulting at depth, so the frequency of their
lengths was compared with known faults, using their
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416 M.H. DE FREITAS

Fig. 15. The fractal characters of River Thames tributaries for

the sub-catchments of the Colne, Lea and Roding, all north of
the Thames. From Boydell (2001) cited by Chandler et al.
(2004).

fractal dimensions; that is, the number N of lengths of

tributary greater than a size S, where in this case S was
set at linear tributary lengths (against which a straight
edge could be set) greater than 2 km when viewed at a
scale of 1:25 000. The fractal relationship between N and
S is N = aS
D. Plotted on log scales this can reveal a
linear relationship between N and S, of slope
D (Fig.
15). Data of this kind exist from work in North America
(Yielding et al. 1996) and indicate that a value for
D
for fault traces within a fault zone could range between
1.1 and 2.0. Figure 15 illustrates the results from the
catchments of the Colne, Lea and Rodding catchments;
values for
D ranged from 1.9 for traces in the
directions of the postulated faults to 2.1 for all direc-
tions, which included stretches of river straightened by
engineering works.
Oil exploration in the North Sea during the late 1960s
contributed much to reveal the structure and geological
history of Britain, particularly from the Mesozoic
onwards. This produced early models for the relation-
ships between the Anglo-Brabant Massif, containing the
London Platform and the Wessex Basin to its south,
the boundary between them being located beneath the
London Basin (Kent 1975), and the area to its immedi-
ate south (Chadwick 1986); see also the fault map for the
UK (British Geological Survey 1996).
Assembling the data that exist for the directions of
structures, both seen and presumed, produces a distri-
bution reminiscent of that associated with strike-slip
faulting (Fig. 16a). If the SWNE-trending folds
mapped by Woolridge are drape folds in a cover
deformed by sinistral strike displacements on north
south-trending faults having the same orientation as
the northsouth-trending monoclines also mapped by
Woolridge (Fig. 12), and if the same is true for the
eastwest-trending folds with respect to dextral move-
ments of NWSE-trending faults, then a conjugate
Reidel shear set appears (Price & Cosgrove 1990) whose
acute angle is bisected by the anticipated direction of
compressive stress from the Alpine orogenic front;
Fig. 16. The fault directions in London and their relationship
to (a) Reidel shear sets and (b) pull-apart basins and push-up
domes (modified from Price & Cosgrove 1990 after Reading
1980).
namely, from SE to NW. Viewed on a globe, the
northern opening of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the
region of Iceland, which occurred at a similar time as
the Alpine orogeny was reaching its climax, would be
associated with crustal stresses oriented from NW to SE.
If this combination of crustal stresses was sucient to
remobilize the eastwest zone of weakness along the
southern boundary of the Anglo-Brabant Massif, then
strike-slip faulting could result.
Given the structural complexity of the basement
along this boundary it is also likely that any such
movements would be on fault branches that are now
broken and discontinuous, and conducive to bends in
the overall strike-slip zone. It is at these bends that local
extension and compression occurs, developing pull-
apart basins (grabens) and push-up domes (horsts) (Fig.
16b) (Reading 1980). This would be exactly the environ-
ment for syntectonic deposition, which could explain
many of the variations within the London Basin in both
the thickness and lithology of the later stages of the
Chalk (Mortimore et al. 2001), and the Formations of
the Palaeogene (King 2006) (see, for example, the ribbon
diagrams of Sumbler (1996) and Ellison et al. (2004)).
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Cross-sections from the Thames Barrier given by
Fookes & Martin (1978) and Horner (1984), and struc-
tures revealed with the development of Docklands
(Howland 1991), could be similarly explained. In par-
ticular, stretching of cover sediment over an uplifting
horst provides an explanation for the horizontal shear-
ing discovered within the London Clay in the Windsor
area, a phenomenon that may cover a wide area (at least
25 km2) and is proven to have been syndepositional
(Chandler et al. 1998).
Although these facts may account for lateral and
vertical variations in the late Cretaceous and Palaeogene
sediments within London, and for the many small faults
and displacements noted by Ellison et al. (2004), they do
not explain how these vertical faults at depth could
express themselves as rivers at ground level. For the
original hypothesis to be credible (i.e. that faults in the
London Basin can be deduced from river patterns) some
further process is required. This process is not known;
however, the region was subjected more than once to
dierential loading from glaciers north of London; these
loads, in theory, can cause the crust in front of the
glaciers to sag and beyond that to bulge (Dawson 1992;
Devoy 1995). Such crustal warping might have been
sucient for the trace of such lines of weakness at depth
to be extended into the cover of drift, in much the same
way as coal mining at depth causes structures at ground
level to sag and heave above the boundary of a longwall
panel at depth (see Goulty & Al-Rawahy 1996; Donnelly
2006).
There were three major glacial advances in Britain,
the Anglian (starting c. 480 ka BP), which came within
a few kilometres of London, those collectively called
Wolstonian (starting c. 350 ka BP) and the Devensian
(starting c. 120 ka BP), whose later stages reached the
shores of South Wales. Maps giving the limits for these
advances show that any forebulges associated with them
would have deformed the crust below London in a
variety of directions starting with warping in an east
west direction and ending with it oriented in a NNE
SSW direction (Ballantyne & Harris 1994). All this
could amount to approximately half a million years
of recent deformation, flexing the crust gently up and
down around axes rotating from eastwest to almost
northsouth.
Thus, although compartmentalization in the London
Basin has not been proved by any of this evidence, ten
independent pieces of evidence all point to its presence;
namely, known structures as recorded by the Geological
Survey and many others, the chalk surface as defined by
the Water Resources Board, water levels in the Chalk as
measured by the Environment Agency, the location of
sand- and gravel-filled anomalies, thought to be pingos,
the fractal description of tributaries and its similarity to
that of known faults, orientations of brittle fracture
coincident with strike-slip faulting and the directions of
crustal stress prevailing in the Palaoegene, the con-
417
Fig. 17. The Plaistow Graben (modified from Newman 2008).
ditions for locally developing horsts and grabens by
reactivated faults within the strike-slip zone, the pres-
ence of syntectonic sedimentation and erosion resulting
from such reactivation, the extraordinary presence of
horizontal shears that are proven to be synsedimentary,
and the eects of forebulging associated with the glacial
advances in the Pleistocene. At the very least, geotech-
nical engineering has good reason to consider the likely
presence of such compartments, and the sudden change
in conditions they can create for subsurface work, as
revealed by the recent discovery of the Plaistow Graben
during tunnelling (Fig. 17; Newman 2008).
The implications of compartments for ground engi-
neering are many. Data banks of geotechnical properties
for the Basin (e.g. as provided by Hight et al. 2001) need
to be used with care. Dierences may reflect more than
local variations in lithology if the data come from
vertical profiles that have dierent histories of loading
and unloading, especially when strata covering horsts
are adjacent to sediment of the same age (and thus
Formation) in a neighbouring graben. The faults them-
selves may be thin in the clays but broader in gravels and
wide in the Chalk, where their internal structure could
be more permeable than their margins, especially if the
latter have been reduced by displacement to a putty-like
consistency. Such faults could divide the Chalk into
compartments yet may also be able to support a flow
regime of their own if hydraulically insulated from the
body of a compartment by their boundaries. The di-
culties of dewatering three sites in Docklands, situated
above the Chalk in an area where faulting in the Chalk
is known, have been recorded by Linney & Withers
(1998); each site behaved very dierently even though
they were separated by a little over 1 km.
Understanding the geological controls on geotechnics
within the London Basin is an example of the contribu-
tion made by basic geology to engineering but one not
easily seen without the insight provided by experience
with the response of the ground to engineering. It is an
example of how Tertiary and Quaternary deposits else-
where in the world could be compartmentalized by
crustal movements, making ground engineering within
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418 M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 18. A simplified block diagram and interpretation of ground conditions along part of the Undercli including the area of
Ventnor (modified from Hutchinson 1991b).
them more complicated than at first expected. Future
work in the London Basin includes the tunnels for
Cross Rail, scheduled for 20102017, Thames Tideway,
scheduled for 20122020 (Anon. 2007a,b), and the cable
tunnels for the National Grid, scheduled for 2009
2016 (Anon. 2008), all of which could encounter such
structures.
Landsliding at Ventnor; the kinematics of
large mobile areas
Analyses of slope stability are best taught using slopes of
simple topography, made from a uniform material and
containing a single predetermined failure surface; with
such an arrangement a Factor of Safety against sliding
can be calculated using the concept of limiting equilib-
rium and the balance of moments. On leaving college
practitioners soon learn that very few slopes have those
characters and that all manner of combinations of
materials and failure surfaces through them are possible.
Ground investigations through such slopes can reveal
many sliding surfaces and numerous water levels, leav-
ing great scope for the choice of parameters to input to
software that now shoulders the weight of calculation.
The problem in these circumstances is superposition;
first an initial slide, which changes conditions, unloading
one part of the slope and loading another in the short
term, and changing its hydrogeology in the long term as
pore pressures at depth respond over time to either a
sudden decrease in total vertical stress or to an equally
sudden increase. Then the next slide occurs, possibly
from a slightly dierent direction and involving part of
the first, and so on. None of this can be reconstructed
easily from subsequent borehole investigations unless
the sequence of sliding can be diagnosed. Worst con-
ditions are therefore assumed for analyses, for want of
something better to use. Further, unless there is good
reason to divide the slope into parts that essentially
operate independently, the analyses will consider it as a
whole, even though a walkover survey may strongly
suggest that this approach is probably inappropriate.
Despite these shortcomings such an approach might be
sucient for assessing slopes in open country.
These diculties are compounded when the initial
failure is a matter of geological history and the time since
it occurred has been sucient for subsequent movement
to reduce what was once a coherent body of ground into
innumerable, and separate, volumes of transported
material, still capable of moving under their own self
weight. Under these circumstances it is likely that the
Factor of Safety against failure can never be calculated
properly but must at some stage equal 1.0 or less at every
point on the surfaces of sliding, although not at every
point on every sliding surface at the same time. When
such a slope has long supported a human population
that knows the ground beneath their property can move
and is probably moving, the controlling parameter for its
geotechnical management is no longer the Factor of
Safety against sliding, but the rate and manner of change
close to ground level. Many towns and villages on the
coasts of Britain, particularly in the south and east, are
aicted by such circumstances. Further, marine erosion
continues to promote instability in many of these slopes
by removing weight from the toe of the slopes and hence
their overall resistance to sliding, a situation that has
required much coastal protection to alleviate.
The slopes forming the southern shores of the Isle of
Wight, from Bonchurch to St. Catherines Point, are an
example of this and have been the subject of consider-
able study, much of which has been summarized in the
papers by Hutchinson (1991ad) and Lee et al. (1991a
c); Figure 18 is a general view of part of the area known
as the Undercli.
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 19. A general map of slide topography above Wheelers
Bay (based on Ip 2002).
The development of the present slopes probably
originates with the formation of the English Channel,
possibly from the late Tertiary, when a land bridge was
created between SE England and France: the Weald
Artois High. South of this the rivers draining southern
England and northern France, extensions of the existing
Solent, Seine, Somme and so on, collected into an
anastomosing sequence of channels draining to the
Western Approaches of the North Atlantic. North of
the land bridge the Thames, Rhine, Maas, Scheldt
and others drained into the North Sea and thence to
the North Atlantic, until that route was blocked by the
advance of the continental Anglian ice sheet, in the
mid-Pleistocene. A lake was created between the snout
of the glacier to the north and the land bridge to the
south, until the lake level overspilled the land bridge and
carved what is now the Strait of Dover, or Pas-de-Calais
(Gibbard 1995).
The southern facing slopes of the channel were sub-
ject to a combination of marine erosion and periglacial
mass wasting, as interglacial periods came and went and
sea levels eventually recovered (Hutchinson 1991d),
possibly leaving the slopes at Ventnor smoothly inclined
towards the Channel and mantled with a veneer of
soliflucted chalk debris spreading as an apron below the
chalk escarpment (Hutchinson et al. 1991).
Figure 19 is a general map of a small part of the mass
movement developed at the coastal town of Ventnor; the
generalized section of Figure 18 would run from top left
to bottom right. The basic geology of the landslip area
is simple: the undisturbed strata are chalk, of Late
Cretaceous age, overlying a mixture of sandstones and
clays of Early Cretaceous age, all dipping at c. 2( SSE,
419
towards the sea. The chalk (Lower Chalk) forms a
rounded scarp of distinctive high ground above the
town. At the base of this scarp is a narrow outcrop of
Upper Greensand that forms the immediate back of the
slope and overlies the Gault (a sti clay), which accounts
for the greater part of the slope on which Ventnor is
sited; this passes down into the Lower Greensand, which
crops out at shore level.
Lithologies are distinctive; at sea level the upper parts
of the Lower Greensand are exposed; they are essentially
white to yellow-coloured sands and weak sandstones
(Sandrock) that pass upwards into pebbly sands and grits
(Carstone), containing phosphatic nodules, and grading
into silty micaceous grey clays, heralding the deeper-
water deposits of the Gault. The Gault, which is largely
seen only in excavations and boreholes, consists of sti to
hard grey fissured clays, when not in a softened state, and
even mudstones in places, which pass up into the similarly
coloured clays, marls and silts of the Passage Beds. These
underlie the Upper Greensand, a sandstone containing
glauconite that gives it a light green to bluegrey colour.
The Upper Greensand is a good aquifer, being extensive
and able to transmit water easily, as is the fractured
Chalk above it, and these horizons discharge ground-
water to the clay slope below, maintaining a reasonably
steady groundwater condition to which the slope down-
stream can adjust. It is not surprising that additional
water from rainfall is associated with an increase in the
incidence of slope movement (Moore et al. 1991).
The long history of landsliding has mixed this simple
succession so that a vertical profile at any point now
reveals material transported down the slope, as near-
surface movement, burying deeper layers, which have
rotated from the horizontal and sometimes brought
stratigraphically older strata higher into the profile than
younger beds. Figure 20 is from the log of one borehole
located towards the toe of the slope.
To understand better how a volume of such disturbed
ground behaves, the damage to built structures, mainly
domestic houses, road surfaces, paving, flights of steps
and retaining walls, was mapped; an extension of engi-
neering geomorphology (Griths & Hearn 1990), using
engineered structures as indicators of displacement.
This damage was usually in the form of cracks whose
orientation and openness could be measured. With
assistance from the owners, such damage can also be
dated, so adding to an understanding of the kinematics
of movement.
Figure 21 shows maps of cumulative damage as
measured in the summers of 2002 and 2008; in many
cases, the date for the start of the damage was either not
known or not ascertained, so the maps are snapshots of
displacements measured at those times.
The maps indicate that c. 90% of the damage seen in
2008 was not apparent in 2002 and that 90% of the
damage visible in 2002 had been repaired by 2008.
Further, two independent surveys recorded almost the
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420 M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 20. An extract from the top 48 m of BH 01 at Wheelers
Bay (see Fig. 19). Asterisks highlight shear surfaces.
same amount of damage over the same area even though
90% of the damage was at dierent locations. Finally,
although the orientation of cracks through a building
will be influenced by the structure and orientation of the
building (hence many cracks are approximately either
normal to or orthogonal to roads, because that is how
the walls of the buildings are oriented) the directions of
the roads are themselves a function of the landslide they
are crossing (see the maps of Hutchinson 1991b), so the
cracks seen tend to be either parallel to orthogonal to
the overall directions of failure within the slipped mass.
The maps show that the ground is locally subsiding,
although in one place it can clearly be seen to be rising.
In many places the ground is moving horizontally
towards east and west lateral boundaries, and towards
the sea; it is also moving away from the sea in some
places, towards the back of the slip. In other words, seen
in plan the ground surface of the slide seems to be
moving in all directions. This result has been indepen-
dently repeated by tracking the movement of global
positioning system (GPS) markers placed on survey
monuments elsewhere in the town (Fig. 22).
Movement seen in elevation presents a very dierent
picture. Borehole logs confirm that the slope is cut
through by countless polished failure surfaces, suggest-
ing that it can probably do what it wants in response to
environmental triggers and coastal erosion. Figure 23 is
a vertical cross-section through the slope. The log of
Borehole 01 records a minimum of 61 polished shear
surfaces in 33 m of Gault Clay and Passage Beds; in a
number of places the logger has referred to many as
they occur in clusters, and if these are counted as one
surface (which gives 61) an intensity of shear surfaces of
about one in every 0.5 m per vertical metre is calculated.
In reality, it is something more than that, with local
intensities approaching one every 0.1 m vertically, about
50% of which are at 10( to the horizontal. Further, 36 of
these (again a minimum number for the same reasons as
described above) were inclined at greater than 20( to the
horizontal, many at 35( and more, and some at as much
as 80(. This gives a polished surface somewhere between
every 0.1 m and 1.4 m horizontally, with most being
separated by 0.6 m on average. Figure 24 illustrates how
1 m3 of this material might appear.
Such an intensity of failure surfaces suggests that the
ground might behave as a viscous fluid seen on the scale
of the landslide, and inclinometer data from elsewhere in
Ventor support this idea. Figure 25 illustrates the data
obtained over 2 years and these data can be divided into
four parts. At the base is a highly viscous layer (A)
extending to c. 95 m below ground level, which is separ-
ated from an upper layer of similar viscosity (C) by a
zone of much lower viscosity (B) at the base of the
Gault, where much shear displacement is concentrated;
an upper zone of inactive ground (D), from ground level
to c. 20 m, is being translated on the surface of zone (C).
It is in the inactive zone that most of the foundations
and services that supply the town are located, and it is
the movement of this zone that is detected by the GPS
survey. Likewise, it is small dierential movements in
this zone that would create the low-level damage sus-
tained by the building stock of the town. The two
damage surveys suggest that the rate of damage is
almost steady state, and this agrees with local perception
(Noton 1991) and the gradients of displacement with
time from the inclinometer, those for 2002 being very
similar to those for 2004.
These data suggest that the movement of old and
much broken slides of this sort might be amenable to
prediction using a model of stratified viscous flow,
having an undulating upper surface (equal to ground
level) and driven by its self weight.
This example of failure in a large volume of ground
highlights the necessity of starting an investigation with
an accurate description of the geology involved at a scale
appropriate for the feature in question; without that it is
impossible to define the product being studied (in this
case broken and failed ground) and link it to the process
that has to be addressed, in this case the kinematics of
slope movement. The same applies to the laboratory
testing of geological materials for their mechanical prop-
erties; although the scale is smaller the problems for
description are no less demanding.
The behaviour of rock specimens
The value to the user of a measured property is in direct
proportion to the suciency of the description for the
material tested. Microscopy has helped enormously in
achieving relevant descriptions for rock as a material,
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 21. Damage recorded (a) in the summer of 2002 (from Ip 2002), (b) in the summer of 2008 (de Freitas, personal mapping of
damage to building stock in the Wheelers Bay area, Isle of Wight, following the procedures described by Ip (2002)).
Fig. 22. The directions of movement of survey monuments as
tracked by GPS. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Isle of Wight
Council).
and ever since Nicol introduced his polarizing prism
(1829) the petrological microscope has been the main-
stay for investigating geological materials. Polarizing
light reveals most sensitively the compositional and
lattice characters of solids (i.e. their mineralogy); thus
descriptions for rock developed by geologists using the
petrological microscope became mineralogically based.
Great advances in understanding rock systems, rock
genesis and crustal evolution came from such studies,
but because this work was based on mineralogy its focus
was traditionally on how these materials formed and
what their formation revealed about the structure and
workings of the Earth. Unfortunately, these descriptions
were not directed to either explaining or predicting
quantitatively the mechanical properties of rock, and are
often inadequate for this purpose.
An indication of the problems associated with achiev-
ing a quantitative link between strength and petrology
was provided by the HoekBrown failure criterion for
rock masses as soon as it was first presented in 1980
421
(Hoek & Brown 1980a,b), and it is presented here in its
original form. In explaining the origins of this relation-
ship the authors said they have drawn on their experi-
ence in both theoretical and experimental aspects of rock
behaviour to develop, by a process of trial and error, the
following empirical relationship between the principal
stresses associated with the failure of rock: (Hoek &
Brown 1980a).
Hoek and Brown envisaged the basic relationship
between the principal stresses at failure (
1

3) within
a rock mass to be of the form
y = s
1
3d2 = m
cx + s
c2
where x =
3.
Two constants regulate the relationship: m, a con-
stant derived from the linear regression of
1 and
3
at failure, and s, for the eect of fractures in the mass
(s = 1.0 for an unfractured mass, i.e. the unconfined
strength of the intact material). Thus the stresses
required to fail a rock mass would be less than those to
fail the intact rock from which the mass is made (i.e. the
unconfined compressive strength of the rock;
c).
It is the values for m over the range of
3 tested that
are of interest here, and listed in Table 3; references to
descriptions of the materials used have been provided by
Hoek & Brown (1980a) and the data used are all in
terms of eective stress.
The igneous rock types can be grouped by their
mineralogy into two broad categories. Gabbro, norite (a
variety of gabbro) and dolerite are basic whereas
granite is acid; the acid and basic rocks have dierent
genesis yet their m values do not reflect this. Granite and
gabbro occupy opposite ends of an igneous rock classi-
fication based on dominant mineralogy and saturation
with respect to SiO2, yet their m values are much more
closely related to each other than those of gabbro
and dolerite, which occupy the same position in the
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422 M.H. DE FREITAS

Fig. 23. Vertical cross-section through the toe of the slope above Wheelers Bay; location shown in Figure 19 (based on Ip 2002).

Fig. 24. The possible appearance of 1 m3 of Gault clay near the

toe of the slope.

mineralogicalSiO2 classification and dier only in crys-

tal size and fabric. However, that dierence in crystal
size and fabric is the key to understanding the descrip-
tions and classifications needed for petrology to be
linked to mechanical properties. Material scientists
would recognize that these rocks were made from similar
material, as their minerals are predominantly silicates,
and so group these igneous rocks according to their
crystal size and the relationship of their crystal bound-
aries, a combination that can be loosely called fabric. It
is their fabric that will control the ease of fracture
propagation and thus their fracture mechanics (see, e.g.
Ashby & Jones 2005). As can be seen from Figure 26,
dolerite has a dierent fabric from granite and gabbro,
and of these rocks the Blackingstone granite (which
provided the greatest number of granite sample tested in
Fig. 25. Displacement with depth and time from an inclinom-
eter survey.
the HoekBrown dataset of 1980) is very coarse grained
with tabular interpenetrating phenocrysts of orthoclase
and plagioclase, some R10 mm in length and R5 mm
in width, with interstitial, almost equidimensional
(R2 mm), quartz intergrowths.
Geological (i.e. petrological) names are a necessary
part of any rock description because of the information
they convey on both mineralogy and fabric, and thus
composition and genesis. However, it is evident that
petrological names are, by themselves, insucient for
relating the material they describe to its mechanical
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 423

Table 3. Test data from Hoek & Brown (1980a)

Rock type m  (sliding) Notes

}
Granite 29.2 Interpenetrating large well-formed crystals*
Gneiss 24.5
Gabbro 23.9 Similar fabric to granite but smaller crystals (c. 2 mm or less)
Norite 23.3 2832( Similar fabric to gabbro
Quartz diorite 23.4
Dolerite 15.2 Similar fabric to gabbro but smaller crystals (c. 10.1 mm)
Quartzite 16.8 Good face-to-face contact of particles
Sandstone 14.3 Mainly point contact between particles

}
Marble 10.6 Interpenetrating well-formed crystals
Dolomite 6.8 1824(
Limestone 5.4 Mainly point contact between particles

* Largest crystals are provided by feldspars.

illustrate the significance of silica to the frictional prop-

Fig. 26. Thin sections of (left to right) granite, gabbro and
dolerite at the same scale and seen in plane-polarized light.
properties. This is further illustrated by the data for
quartz diorite (mineralogically intermediate between
gabbro and granite, often by contamination of a more
basic magma by silica-rich country rock during intru-
sion) and gneiss (a metamorphic rock, partially melted
but not igneous) reported in Table 3; despite their
dierent genesis their fabric is suciently like that of
gabbro and granite, respectively, for them to respond
like them mechanically.
The values for m for coarse-grained sedimentary
rocks also made from silicates (quartz-rich sandstones
and quartzite in Table 3) are similar to each other but
lower than that created by the interpenetrating crystal
fabric of silicates in igneous rocks.
Although the value of m reflects fabric it also reflects
composition, as can be seen by comparing the m values
for silicates with those for the carbonates, limestone,
dolomite and marble (a metamorphosed limestone).
Marble has a fabric that shares common features with
that of granite and gabbro, and has the highest value
for m amongst the carbonates, as would be expected;
nevertheless, its value for m is only 0.30.5 that of
silicate rocks having similar fabrics.
Composition is more important than fabric for slid-
ing friction. The plots of Mohr circles in shear stress v.
normal stress space provided by Hoek & Brown (1980a)
erties of igneous rocks and those sedimentary products
that have resisted weathering. These values have been
derived from the linear portions of the failure envelopes
where the eective normal stress (which Hoek & Brown
presented as normalized by the unconfined compressive
strength of the material tested so as to reduce the size of
the plots needed) is greater than 2.0 for the silicate rocks
and 1.0 for the carbonate rocks; that is, where the
magnitude of eective normal stress largely suppresses
dilation and comminution will be operating on failing
surfaces.
In an attempt to study further the descriptions needed
to link rock fabric to rock strength attention has been
paid to reducing the eect of friction on the overall
result. To remove friction as far as possible it is neces-
sary to have the principal stresses equal so there is no
shear stress generated by them, and to promote failure
by increasing pore pressure. However, if the eects of
pore fluid interactions with surfaces are also to be
avoided the use of liquids to generate pore pressure
brings other unwanted problems. Failure in tension
oered the advantage of reducing the eect of friction
on the overall result without the need to use pore fluids
and specimens failed in tension carried few signs of shear
damage on their failure surfaces.
Direct tensile tests on rock require large numbers of
specimens, as many fail at or near the platens, leaving
the correctness of their result in doubt. An alternative
was sought but all have their own problems (see Jaeger
et al. 2007). Three-point bending necessitates the crea-
tion of a notch, and this was not wanted, as the study
was to discover how fabric influences the initiation of
failure and thus those aspects of fabric that should be
included in a petrological description. Brazilian testing
was also avoided because of the failure at the points of
diametral compression. For this reason the internal
expansion of hoops of rock seemed to oer the attrac-
tion of failing samples in a predetermined way at a
predetermined location (Fig. 27). The problem with this
test is that no rigorous solution exists for relating the
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424 M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 27. The hoop test.
loads applied to the resistances obtained. For this reason
the values measured were compared with those from
good-quality tensile tests obtained by Al-Samahiji
(1992) on samples of sandstone.
By plotting the force at failure (F) against the area of
the failure surface it generated (A), Butenuth and co-
workers discovered that F v. A had a gradient, in
units of (N m
2), whose value was exactly the same as
that obtained from tests in direct tension (Fig. 28;
Butenuth et al. 1993). The nature of this conclusion, that
tensile strength is given by F/A, was further sup-
ported by results from direct tension tests on granite
conducted by Wijk et al. (1977), which, when plotted as
F/A, gave the same value (Butenuth 1997).
It has long been known that failure in solids is
dominated by pre-existing boundaries, particularly the
interfaces between crystals and those between grains; a
result underlined by further work on the failure of
anisotropic rocks (Butenuth et al. 1994). Plots of (F/
A), where F is essentially tensile and pulling surfaces
apart, appear to unify results from dierent loading
arrangements. Thus for petrological descriptions to
relate more closely to mechanical properties it is neces-
sary to describe these petrological interfaces (crystal and
grain boundaries) more appropriately.
In addition to confirming this result, which agrees
with experience in materials science across a wide range
of materials, the plots of F/A raised two questions
related to the link between sample size and sample
strength, outlined below.
It is conventional wisdom that the strength of a
sample of a material reduces as the size of the sample
Fig. 28. Results from the hoop test.
increases; this is explained by the presence of ever larger
flaws and referred to as the Weibull eect, being
described by him in 1939 and more fully later (Weibull
1951). The results shown in Figure 29 question the
uniqueness of this perception; the point load tests
reported by Wijk et al. (1977) clearly show the expected
trend of strength decreasing with increasing sample size
but when the same data are plotted as F/A that trend
disappears.
It is also apparent from plots of F/A that the
relationship between force at failure and area of failure
need not always be linear as shown so far, but can be
either non-linear or approximately bi-linear, at least
over the range of areas studied. Figure 30 illustrates an
example of this with the point load results of Brook
(1977). In other words, there can be a threshold to the
size over which a material in extension behaves in a
certain way; it would be helpful to know what controls
that threshold.
Figure 28 illustrates a further point revealed by
plotting F/A, that there is often an intercept on the
area axis (A0). The meaning of this is unclear but it may
have a similar role to that of the constant m in the
HoekBrown criterion; that is, it describes in some way
the work required to bring the sample to failure. This
was suggested by the way A0 varied when transversely
anisotropic specimens of metamorphic rock were tested
with the plane of anisotropy at dierent angles from the
plane of platen separation (Butenuth et al. 1994). Here
A0 was related to fabric.
It is conceivable that quantities such as m and A0 also
contain an element for any stored strain energy (also
called residual stress) that a sample may possess. Metal-
lurgists and mechanical engineers are familiar with the
distorting eects of such energy, which is located in the
lattice of solids and at their boundaries (Youtsos 2006).
Price (1966) demonstrated the potential for such energy
in rocks with the aid of photoelasticity, and the release
of such energy explains many near-surface phenomena,
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 425

Fig. 29. Point load results for Bohus Granite and their plot as F/A.

Fig. 30. Point load results for sandstone and dolerite and their
plot as F/A.
especially exfoliation, the increase in intensity of jointing
towards a free surface such as ground level, and the
disintegration of cores from depth, which are intact
sticks when recovered but split into discs with time
(Price & Cosgrove 1990).
Stored strain energy, if and when present in a speci-
men, is neither described nor measured as such but lost
within the general result for stiness or strength; yet its
release is time dependent and could be an active compo-
nent of progressive failure. Thus the values measured for
stiness and strength can deteriorate in the long term; a
trend that is well known and ascribed to the collective
eects of agents of weathering. There is a considerable
degree of uncertainty concerning the magnitude of such
energy and the manner of its release, yet it is a compo-
nent of geology that should be described if petrology
and geological history are to be quantitatively related to
mechanical properties.
Fig. 31. Variation of compression-wave velocity in granite with
overall saturation (from Lee 1987).
This uncertainty is illustrated by the variation in
compression-wave velocity through cores of fresh,
slightly, moderately and highly weathered granite of
Jurassic age, from Eonyang in South Korea (Fig. 31)
(Lee 1987). This rock, when moderately weathered to
fresh, has to be excavated using drill and blast tech-
niques, yet the road cuttings so created disintegrate,
rather than chemically alter, in a few years; mechanical
forces seem to dominate even though the climate on
site favours chemical forces. Core samples (30 mm diam-
eter  60 mm long) were saturated under vacuum and
then allowed to dry, their dried weight being taken as
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426 M.H. DE FREITAS

a guide to their overall degree of saturation; unfortu-

nately, the uniformity of saturation within them was not
known and probably increased towards their centre.
Compression-wave velocity increased as overall satura-
tion increases but the increase is not smooth.
The most convincing explanation for these variations
is the structure of capillary water within the three types
of weathered rock (Childs 1969). At low saturation
pendular water can be expected, creating discrete rings
around points of solid contact or where solid surfaces
are suciently close for water to bridge them. The
associated menisci would exert forces that compress
existing points of contact and possibly bring into contact
surfaces that, when dry, were close but not touching. A Fig. 32. Schematic illustration of microstructural features to be
marked reduction in the number of menisci and their encountered in geological materials (based on work from the
radii (which govern the force of attraction they can Gerling Institut fr Schadenforschung und Schadenverhutung,
generate) occurs when saturation wets all the solid Cologne, Germany).
surfaces, enclosing air in the voids; this is funicular
water, and its onset may be related to the sharp reduc-
tion in wave velocity seen in fresh and moderately
weathered specimens. Increasing saturation from that
stage gradually replaces mechanically soft air remaining
in voids with much stier water, so enhancing wave
propagation whilst bringing the rock to full saturation
with water that is still at pressures less than atmospheric
(i.e. capillary water). If this reconstruction is correct
then the behaviour of the highly weathered granite
suggests that its voids are too large for pendular water to
have the same influence and that wave velocity is con-
trolled by the influence of funicular and capillary water.
If, in addition to these eects, residual stresses existed
and are released by the presence of water then part of
the fall in wave velocity could be the result of funicular
water coating all solid surfaces. As will be described
later, there is evidence for believing that surfaces of
silicate minerals are able to respond to water at room
temperature by amounts of relevance to geotechnics and
certainly within a few hours, even possibly within min-
utes. The lack of response of the highly weathered
granite could thus also be due, in part, to the absence
of residual stress, it having been dissipated through
weathering.
The behaviour of rock specimens leaves many ques-
tions unanswered and in need of research before petrol- Fig. 33. The experimental arrangement for studying the
ogy can be linked in a quantitative way to mechanical response of a calcite surface (Butenuth 1991).
properties.
The responses described above occur at the surfaces The response of mineral surfaces
of solids and presume that the surfaces are inert There are many types of surface in rock, as illustrated in
inasmuch as they do not respond to the presence of the schematic cartoon of Figure 32, and any change that
water. Weathering demonstrates this presumption does is going to occur within a rock will start at these
not hold for any length of time. Surfaces are a vital part surfaces. One such change that has long been known to
of chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering, occur is the dissolution of calcite. This can be studied by
because they influence so strongly the physical and observing the response of a cleavage surface of Iceland
chemical forces available for generating change. Much spar to contact with water. Figure 33 illustrates an
more needs to be known about the responses of geotech- experimental set-up where a solid mineral surface,
nical significance that are encountered on the surfaces of formed by cleaving a calcite rhomb, is covered with
geological materials. deionized water that is sealed from atmospheric CO2 by
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 34. The response of water in contact with a solid, with
time (Butenuth 1991).
a layer of n-heptane floating on its surface. Change in
the water quality is measured by observing its pH with
time, and change in the nature of the solid surface and
its immediate subsurface is observed using an acoustic
microscope (Butenuth 1991). The acoustic microscope
transmits an impulse of known strength through the
water and measures the strength of its return; when
the angle of incidence for the acoustic wave is vertical to
the solid surface the dierence reflects the elasticity of
the interface (Briggs 1992). The lens of the microscope
can be adapted to emit collimated waves so that the
elasticity in specific directions can be measured. By
rotating the solid surface beneath the lens the variation
in elasticity with crystallographic direction across the
rhomb is detected and the change in that condition with
time can be measured.
The results of such observations are shown in Figure
34; the quality of water above a glass microscope slide
measured in this way changes hardly at all with time
whereas that above the calcite cleavage surface changes
rapidly. The speed of the reaction is of note; the reaction
is over in a matter of minutes. This is a geological
process that need not take years to occur. The way in
which this change is accomplished is also of note; Figure
35 illustrates how the elasticity of the cleavage surface
changed with time; the solid substrate was pulling itself
apart, as atoms and molecules release themselves from
the surface by dissolution, thus damaging the lattice
from which they come.
These results also illustrate a problem of considerable
significance for studies linking chemical change to mech-
anical change, because changes on the solid side of the
interface have to be described in terms of an anisotropic
medium whereas changes on the liquid side of the same
427
Fig. 35. The change in velocity of reflected wave with time and
s
orientation over a 101 d
1 cleavage surface of calcite (Butenuth
et al. 1992).
interface can be described only in terms of an isotropic
medium. There are severe diculties to be overcome in
getting the quantitative descriptions for these two sides
of the common interface together, and as most of the
naturally occurring geological minerals are anisotropic
this is a subject that has to be addressed eventually in
chemo-mechanical models of geological materials.
Mineral surface reactions to water also occur for
many other minerals of relevance to geotechnics,
especially those built from lattices of silica (i.e. the large
family of silicate minerals). Many silicate rocks swell on
saturation. This is well known in clay-rich sedimentary
rocks but can occur in other rocks, although to a lesser
extent. Figure 36a shows the swelling measured in a
sample of gneiss taken from 1787 m below ground level
by the KTB Pilot Borehole for the Continental Deep
Drilling Programme in Germany (Schult & Shi 1997).
No petrological details were given but the material will
be similar to that illustrated in Butenuth et al. (1994).
The gneiss was first oven-dried then submerged in
deionized water. Figure 36b shows the response of
granite from Hauzenberg in Germany; again no petrol-
ogy was given other than major mineral percentages:
quartz 27%, plagioclase 37%, orthoclase 26%, biotite
3%, muscovite 5%. The swelling measured is reversible,
within the limits of observation used (strain gauges and
displacement transducers) and illustrated for the granite;
this implies that a time-dependent and largely reversible
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428
Fig. 36. The linear strain of (a) gneiss and (b) granite, with time
(modified from Schult & Shi 1997).
process can operate on the surfaces of the silicate
minerals.
In contrast to this, it is well known that irreversible
reactions occur on the surfaces of silicate minerals in the
presence of water. Figure 37 illustrates how the concen-
trations of Fe, Mg and Si change in water in contact
with powdered olivine, a mineral that is a solid solution
between Fe and Mg ((MgFe)2SiO4). Two grams of
powdered olivine, of specific surface area 4200 cm2 g
1,
were placed in 300 cm3 distilled water of pH 7 at 25(C
and the concentration of Fe, Mg and Si was observed
with time; the pH of the solution was not controlled
M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 37. Concentration of Fe, Si and Mg in water in contact
with olivine, with time (Butenuth 1988).
once the powder was in contact with the water. The
results are shown in Figure 37, where concentration is
expressed as moles  105 per 300 cm3 of solution to
facilitate a direct comparison between concentrations
(because 1 mole is 6.023  1023 units of that substance).
If the solid solution of (FeMg)2SiO4 had simply fallen
apart, the number of silicon moles would equal the sum
of those for iron and magnesium; clearly they do not.
The silicate lattice hosting Mg and Fe had not simply
dissolved into its components (a congruent process) once
in contact with water, but had come apart in a way that
released more magnesium than silica, the release of iron
remaining largely unchanged (an incongruent process).
The same has been seen with feldspar (sanadine), mus-
covite and kaoline (Butenuth 1988). This incongruency
suggests that the surface of the silicate mineral now
contained sites where Fe and Mg had left the lattice, so
leaving the concentration of Si there greater than before,
and the coherent silicate framework that once formed
the edge of the lattice where it terminated at the mineral
boundary, now damaged and open. Similarly, some of
the silica in the solution may be free and some could still
be attached to oxygen, iron and magnesium. The solid
surface can be imagined as having been ripped open by
the water, with the metal cations entering the solution
and the hydrogen ions attaching themselves to the bro-
ken ends of the silica framework. These reactions started
immediately and were well in progress in less than 1 h.
The response of these silicates suggests that particles
made from either single minerals (such as a single but
eroded crystal of quartz or feldspar or mica) or mosaics
of them, as found in the detritus from rock weathering,
are likely to possess, in nature, surfaces that are similarly
damaged; these account for the great majority of soil-
forming materials encountered in engineering. Likewise,
the pores and fissures of rocks made from silicates,
which are accessible to water either as liquid or vapour,
could be similarly aected. Limestone and marble, bed-
ded gypsum, halite and coal represent the majority of
the rocks not made from silicate minerals, implying that
most rocks encountered in engineering contain bound-
aries where silica is being concentrated, with time, by
these means.
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
Fig. 38. The response of alluvial sands to water (Butenuth
1989).
An indication of what this means in practice is
provided by the response of alluvium to water. Figure 38
illustrates the change that occurs in the concentration of
silica in 200 cm3 of water, with time, when 30 g of
ordinary alluvium is introduced in a dispersed form;
concentration is given as mols per 300 cm3 of solute
(water), time is in days and the experiments were con-
ducted at 20(C  1(C at atmospheric pressure. The
sediment, which ranged in particle size from coarse to
fine sand, came from a tributary of the River Rur in the
Eifel, and consisted mainly of rounded particles of
polycrystalline quartz and feldspar, with a few mafic
particles (possibly amphibole and/or pyroxene), flakes of
biotitic mica and small angular shards of brick.
The lower curve shows the increase in silica concen-
tration with time that occurred when this sediment was
placed in distilled water. The upper curve shows the
decrease in silica concentration with time that occurred
when another sample of same sediment was placed in
water that was supersaturated with SiO2. The set of
results between these two curves record the SiO2 concen-
tration when a further sample of the same sediment was
placed in water whose SiO2 concentration was equal to
that for quartz solubility. The alluvial particles released
Si when placed in distilled water (desorption) and
accepted Si when in water that was supersaturated with
Si (adsorption) but neither accepted nor released Si in
water where the concentration was already that of
429
Fig. 39. The formation of silica gel; schematic illustrations
(modified from Butenuth et al. 1998).
quartz. The SiO2 concentration of the adsorption and
desorption curves tend towards values for the solubility
of quartz suggesting that, despite the varied mineralogy
and petrology of the alluvial particles, they generally
behaved as if they were quartz. This they could do if
their outer layers had been enriched in silica, as the
leaching process revealed in Figures 37 and 38 suggests
does happen.
Silica in this state, located at the boundaries of
particles in sediment and in pores and fissures in rock,
provides the potential for the formation of silica gel.
This is a material that has the capacity to contribute to,
if not directly cause, many properties seen in soils and
rock; for example, the dramatic loss of strength of rock
with saturation and the remarkable increase in strength
of clays with drying. Features that are reversible with the
addition and subtraction of water, such as the swelling
and shrinking of rock (Fig. 36) could be founded in silica
gel. This is a material that should be much more widely
appreciated in geotechnics than it is at present.
Silica gels and geotechnical properties
For most people, gels are those confections enjoyed for
dessert; wobbly semi-rigid solids. Although these are
organic they provide a good analogy for the inorganic
gels that can form from silica because both gels start as
a molecular dispersion in water that forms, by itself, a
soft solid that is capable of hardening with time. Figure
39 illustrates the established understanding of how such
gels occur, as outlined below.
(a) In the case of silica gel the starting point can be an
aqueous solution of monomolecular silicic acid,
H4SiO4, or a molecular dispersion of these, as SiO4
loosely bound with OH, in water. Molecules of
H2O can condense from this assemblage, allowing
the Si of the original molecules to join each other
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430 M.H. DE FREITAS

by sharing a single oxygen (SiOSi), so starting a

chain; a process of polymerization.
(b) These chains eventually aggregate to form spheres
of colloidal dimensions, within which polymer-
ization may continue (Iler 1979). With sucient
numbers these spheres of silica acid in suspen-
sion produce what is recognized as a sol; an
unstable and incoherent system that is capable of
either flocculating or gelling, depending on its
environment.
(c) If conditions permit continued polycondensation
and the formation of spheres of colloidal size, and
if these are able to join, so coalescing to form a
coherent system, then a gel is formed. Its compo-
nents will be in the nanometre scale (110 nm) and
dispersed, capable of being carried by flows of
water. It has long been known that in this con-
dition they can continue to lose water, even under
water (Stuart 1953), and that with time recogniz-
able phases of crystalline silica can be detected
forming within them.
Opal, a hydrous form of silica (SiO2.nH2O), exhibits
many characters that might be expected to develop from
a silica gel. The low-temperature amorphous varieties
are composed of spheres of silica, 150 nm or greater in
diameter, that can bind themselves together in a regular
manner to create an orderly 3D structure for the solid
they form and the pores between them (Jones et al. 1964;
Sanders & Darragh 1971). Fig. 40. The density of glass spheres measured in water and
The association of such gels with silicate minerals can n-heptane.
be studied further with the aid of pycnometers. It is long
known that particle density should not be measured in Figure 40 illustrates the experimental results obtained
water as many materials react to it because it is a polar measuring mixtures of glass (SiO2), as ballotini, nomi-
fluid; that is, the molecule of H2O has unbalanced forces nally 5 mm in diameter, in distilled de-aired water and
making it electrically positive at one end and negative at n-heptane. The ballotini were dried over P2O5 and were
the other. Significant variations in the measurement of in contact with the measuring fluids for about 1 h, at
particle density can occur when water is used, which can normal room temperature and atmospheric pressure;
result in calculations of bulk density being in error by as pycnometers of nominal volume 50 cm3 were used. The
much as 50% (Passas et al. 1996). Thus the standards slopes of the lines (each having an r = 0.9999) dier and
recommend the use of a non-polar fluid (BSI 1981; ISO their extrapolation to an intersection with the ordinate,
1983; Deutsche Industrie Norm (DIN) 1985; Norme the specific volume of the mix when its mass fraction is
Franaise (NF-ISO) 1988a,b; ASTM 1993). 100% liquid, reflects the dierent densities of water and
To study more closely the response of crystalline n-heptane. By contrast, extrapolation of the results to
silicate particles to contact with water single silicate the specific volume for the solid produces very good
crystals were ground to coarse sand and their density was agreement of values for the density of glass. So, similar
measured in water and a non-polar fluid, n-heptane, and measures of the density of the glass are obtained in both
their dierence compared with that of glass (ballotini) water and n-heptane.
measured in the same fluids. This was done by creating When a crystal of orthoclase Na(1
x)Kx(AlSi3O8)
mixtures of the solid in question and the liquid in which it was crushed and its solid density measured in the same
was to be measured, so that the mass fraction of each is way (again r = 0.9999) dierent values for its density
known. The specific volume (volume per unit mass, i.e. were obtained: 2.650 g cm
3 in n-heptane and 2.378 g
the inverse of density) of the solids is measured at cm
3 in distilled water. Table 4 gives the densities of
dierent mass fractions and by extrapolating the best-fit various silicates studied in this way.
line joining these points to the end members, where the Reference to Figure 40 shows that each of these
mass fraction of the mix is either 100% solid or 100% dierences is based on a number of separate measure-
liquid, the density of the solid or the liquid is obtained. ments and in each case the density of the particle
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 431

Table 4. Densities of common silicates measured in water and

n-heptane (from Butenuth et al. 2010)

Material Density in Density in Dierence in

n-heptane distilled water densities
(g cm
3) (g cm
3)

Glass spheres 2.518 2.512 0.006

Plagioclase 2.753 2.665 0.088
Quartz* 2.639 2.482 0.157
Olivine 3.315 3.140 0.175
Orthoclase 2.650 2.378 0.272

* Derived from crushed Sherwood Sandstone (formerly Bunter Sand-

stone).

measured in water is less than that measured in

n-heptane. Contact with water has a rapid eect and so
is most probably happening at the surface of the parti-
cles. One explanation for this loss in density is the
leaching that would occur if the silicate lattice is
attacked as described above; this would leave a particle
surface enriched in silica as its lattice is broken open, so
permitting aluminium, iron, magnesium, sodium, potas-
sium and other elements hosted in the silicate lattice to
escape. The enrichment in silica and the lack of order in
the damaged lattice could provide the ingredients for
sols in a form that evolve to gels on the particle surface
in the correct environment. By way of example, a 1 mm
diameter grain of quartz of density 2.65 surrounded by a
0.01 mm skin of opalline silica of density 2.0 would have
an overall density of 2.63, and a layer 0.1 mm thick
would reduce the density to 2.49. It should be noted
that, as a consequence of such reactions occurring
within the pycnometer, the density of the measuring
fluid must change with time and its value should also be
determined to improve interpretation of results.
Such gels have properties that depend upon their Fig. 41. Maturation of silica gels: (a) development of E with
history, in particular the degree to which polymerization time (modified from Hunt & Ayres 2001); (b) development of
strength with temperature (modified from Adachi & Sakka
and dewatering are attained; long before the modern 1990).
methods of creating silica gels were established, Hatschek
(1932) demonstrated that gels are capable of developing that can occur (in their case at about 900(C and
a Youngs modulus (E) in excess of 2 MN m
2 in less achieved within a few days; Fig. 41b).
than 50 h. The industrial interest in silica gels has Given the periods over which many sediments have
generated many methods for manufacturing them so been buried (providing time far greater than in any
as to control their history of polymerization with time production process in a laboratory) and the depths to
by processes based on the use of tetramethoxysilane which they can be buried (supplying copious thermal
(TMOS) and tetraethoxysilane (TEOS); called alcogels, energy, even at an average of 1(C per 30 m of burial),
they remain silica gels and can be matured to produce and the heat flow associated with many subsiding
pure silica glass. Many indirect methods for measuring basins (ensuring a plentiful supply of heat), it is hardly
the change in properties of such gels with time and surprising to find silica in its highly crystalline form, as
environment have also been developed. Hunt & Ayres quartz, forming overgrowths to particles. Nor should it
(2001) used coherent light on a TEOS-based gel to be surprising to find silica so widely present as a particle
observe the development of E with time, which rose coating and pore filling material in siliclastic sediments,
from zero in the sol to 100 kN m
2 in c. 12 h (Fig. 41a). occurring in its less well-crystallized versions as various
Adachi & Sakka (1990) used the resonance of a TMOS- clay minerals and possibly in an amorphous colloidal
based gel to observe the development of E with time and state. Such silicate is clearly visible in SEM images yet
temperature, and noted the dramatic rise in modulus too small to be resolved by the polarized light of
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
432
Table 5. Selected values for static and sliding friction (from Horn & Deere 1962)
Mineral Static dry () Static (wet) (s)
Quartz 0.110.13 0.420.51
Feldspar 0.110.12 0.760.77
Muscovite 0.410.45 0.220.26
Chlorite 0.53 0.22
Serpentine 0.620.76 0.290.48
Steatite 0.38 0.23
Calcite 0.14 0.68
* The kinematic value for quartz based on the average maximum and minimum values during stickslip.
conventional microscopes, and is not detectable by
X-ray because it lacks a lattice.
Such silica-rich gel-like surface coatings to particles
formed from a wide variety of silicate minerals could
help explain some of the phenomena associated with
surface friction that have been well known for a con-
siderable time in geotechnics. In 1962 Horn & Deere
commenced a study of the friction of mineral surfaces,
work suggested by Terzaghi and Peck, and determined
values for static and sliding friction as shown in Table 5
(Horn & Deere 1962). With the exception of calcite the
other minerals listed are silicates, built from networks of
SiO4; quartz and feldspars are tectosilicates, sharing all
four of their oxygens, and the remainder are phyllosili-
cates, sharing only three of their oxygens. Many samples
were tested.
The surfaces of the tectosilicates have similar values
of friction when dry but this similarity is lost when they
are wetted. Further, their friction increases in the pres-
ence of water; water has a dramatic eect upon them.
The surfaces of the phyllosilicates behave in almost
exactly the opposite way. Their friction, when dry, is
variable but always reduces when wetted. Dierences
between static and kinetic values, which appear on
wetting the surfaces, are significant in quartz, much less
so in serpentine and steatite, and undetected in feldspar,
micas and calcite.
Many types of force operate at surfaces so that two
flat surfaces, when brought together, exhibit a resistance
to relative movement that comes from the composition
of the subsurface as well as the condition of the surface.
Such forces are likely to be the seat of kinetic friction
between the surfaces, as this is the resistance during
sliding when surface conditions are in constant change.
These forces, together with any others that cause
adhesion between the surfaces, will also generate static
friction. Thus the dierence between static and kinetic
friction of flat surfaces (i.e. those without roughness)
should reflect the presence of adhesion. Quartz shows
this characteristic (Table 5), as do serpentine and steatite
to a lesser extent. The other silicates do not, and that
may be due to their sliding surface being controlled by
cleavage; feldspars and micas have excellent cleavage, as
does the carbonate, calcite, and it would be dicult for
frictional sliding to create particles from them that were
M.H. DE FREITAS
Kinematic (wet) (k) Dierence (s
k) Adhesion (% of s)
0.230.27* 0.190.24 45.247.1
0.760.77 0.00 0.0
0.220.26 0.00 0.0
0.22 0.00 0.0
0.260.48 0.030.00 10.30.0
0.19 0.04 17.4
0.68 0.00 0.0
not bounded by cleavage. This would not be so with
quartz, and the significance of this is that the sliding
surface for quartz will invariably be formed from a
broken, and hence damaged lattice; exactly the site that
would attract damage from the water molecule. Serpen-
tine, which is derived from olivine, itself a mineral
without cleavage, can be expected to possess some of
these characters too. Steatite is a form of talc, which
does have good cleavage, but comes from olivine and
thus the extent to which its cleavage is developed will
depend on the extent to which its parent olivine has
been altered. In contrast to this, cleavage surfaces form
a natural path through a lattice leaving an orderly
arrangement of molecular bonds at their surface. Any
boundary layer that has developed on them might have
a stability inherited from the forces coming from the
substrate on which it forms that is not available to
layers forming on damaged lattices, and hence exhibit
no appreciable dierence between static and kinetic
conditions.
Almost 50 years have passed since Horn & Deere
presented their results, yet the relationship between
mineral surfaces and the mechanical properties remains
poorly described and speculative. There is great poten-
tial here for advance. Despite these uncertainties it
appears that the particle which should be considered
natural in many soils and most rocks is one that contains
a reactive boundary capable of responding to water. If
gels are involved, many of the phenomena seen in rocks,
as well as soils, could be explained (Fig. 42).
The relative sizes of the elements shown cover three
orders of magnitude; hence Figure 42 is schematic rather
than a drawing of real conditions. The grains are of the
order of hundreds of microns; the boundary layer in
contact with the grains (often called cement) is prob-
ably a few microns thick. Filler cement if formed from
polymerized silica sol will probably be in the form of
spherical aggregates ranging from nano- to micrometre
in size, whereas the primary particles themselves will be
of nanometre dimensions. All these could be porous and
capable of hosting water, allowing very large capillary
pressures to be generated, in the gigapascal range. Thus
saturation of material that is partially saturated can
result in substantial losses of strength. Likewise the
desiccation of these materials could cause cracking,
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 433

Fig. 42. Schematic illustration of the boundary conditions thought to be possible with the presence of silica gel (modified from
Butenuth 2001).
which widens the range of menisci that can be formed
and hence the range of strengths that can be generated.
When fully saturated these gels can swell to fill remain-
ing pores when space exists or cause expansion of the
host material when no further space is available. How
these materials respond to change in water pressure has
yet to be determined but their presence at grain contacts
must facilitate the mechanics of eective stress and assist
the development of creep under constant eective stress.
Realizing this potential; the roles for
industry and academia
Lapworth and Terzaghi were contemporaries who devel-
oped their subjects by their own discoveries and the
application of these to the problems of the day. The
geotechnical world was small and those practising within
it had close and direct contacts with those researching
the properties and character of rocks and soils. Research
and application were essentially united and geology for
engineers was synonymous with engineering geology.
Ninety years later the situation is rather dierent; engi-
neering students may find themselves being taught
geology either by earth scientists who never have used
the subject in geotechnics or by engineers who never
have worked with geologists. Neither of these types of
tutor reflects the geological background that either
Lapworth or Terzaghi brought to the subject. Geology
for engineers is now vulnerable to becoming a course
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
434 M.H. DE FREITAS
Fig. 43. Geology for engineers and engineering geology.
that introduces the routine application of basic geologi-
cal tools in a rudimentary way. When these, by them-
selves, are insucient engineering geology is required
and the division separating these two seems to be the
creation of a conceptual model of either the ground or
the material. Only with the aid of such a model can the
ground be properly investigated and engineered.
Figure 43 illustrates this circumstance and provides a
basis for considering where the need for research origi-
nates, and hence where research potential can be real-
ized. The large arrows at the base of the figure represent
the needs for research. In most cases these originate
when routine practice, which often uses geology at a
simple level, no longer provides an answer to a problem
(arrow 1). In many cases the answers required can be
provided by experienced engineering geologists and will
involve a component of greater geological understand-
ing, coupled with an ability to marry the situation so
revealed to appropriate construction techniques. How-
ever, there will be problems for which these solutions are
limiting the works, mainly by their expense but also by
the lack of options current knowledge provides. Lack of
knowledge prevents work being completed quickly, eco-
nomically and safely because the processes happening in
the ground cannot be quantitatively predicted. That is
where research is fruitfully applied (arrow 2). Academic
research, if successful, is the tried and tested route for
providing the options that do not yet exist and econom-
ies that cannot yet be achieved.
Powerful companies and corporations develop and
retain their academic research potential to create an
in-house industrial university; geotechnics once did this
too, with such organizations as the Wimpey Laborato-
ries and Soil Mechanics Ltd., all having sta involved
with research; Glossop was a great advocate of this. Soil
mechanics, as a subject in the UK, was largely born
from the work of the Building Research Establishment
at Watford (Burland 2008). Memory of this is being lost
but the thinking behind it needs to be re-established if
the potential for research to benefit industry is to be
realized. This means that the benefits from research are
in almost direct proportion to the closeness between
industry and academia. The work described here, on the
London Basin, large mature landslides, descriptions of
materials, understanding of failure, are all examples of
arrow 2. This is more about communication than about
funding; industry needs to make its problems known to
academia; the lines of communication for many are too
weak and too long.
Figure 43 also has an arrow pointing left, arrow 3.
This represents curiosity-driven research, often pursued
on a meagre budget and usually some way from imple-
mentation at an industrial level; the work on mineral
surfaces described here is of that kind. It is easy to
dismiss the findings of such work as solutions in search
of a problem but wrong to do so. Curiosity-driven
research is a necessary component of the way our
research schools grow and prosper, because without it
researchers become unimaginative and even boring.
Curiosity-driven research needs to be protected and
valued in geotechnics as much as it is in the blue-sky
realms of maths, physics and chemistry. It can be the
seedbed for completely new industries; radiochemistry,
holograms and laser light were conceived this way; they
were years ahead of the technology that could use them
but are now in everyday use throughout society.
In the early days of geotechnics practical problems
were not far removed from the research to solve them
(Dunnicli & Peck Young 2006; Burland 2008). Case his-
tories, life-blood for the application of uniformitarianism,
 Downloaded from http://qjegh.lyellcollection.org/ by Tint Lwin Swe on March 11, 2017
THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE
were well documented and revealing. The complexities
of modern management have made this much more
dicult to achieve and problems are often not revealed
properly until there is a claim. What would Terzaghi
have thought if either an engineer or scientist blamed the
ground for their troubles rather than their lack of
knowledge? The laws of nature are constant, as are the
principles of geology that give the way of thinking to be
used when applying them to the Earth. The potential
they oer for improving geotechnics will only grow as
knowledge to apply them correctly has been acquired.
Conclusions
The principles of superposition and uniformitarianism
are applied, either knowingly or unknowingly, at every
stage in engineering geology. Geology cannot be used
without them. They are a manner of thinking that comes
with neither rules nor equations. These have to be
defined by the user.
To define these it is necessary to use an adequate
description of either the material or the mass in ques-
tion; a description suitable for the task in hand, some-
thing fit for purpose. This may require new descriptions
of the sort not available at present. The discovery,
assessment and correlation of descriptors to physical
and chemical properties in soil and rock is in itself an
area that deserves continuous research.
Allied to that is the need to view the problem at an
appropriate scale. That may mean looking at a problem
at many scales, but the essence of this is to always
superimpose relevant and related information, whatever
the scale being used. Thus the far field serves and
informs the near field. The volume involved rather than
the volume considered determines what is represen-
tative in a Representative Elemental Volume.
The nature of superposition means that there is
invariably doubt concerning the order of events, particu-
larly as these happened in the past. Further, the
sequence of some events may be indeterminate if a
number coexisted, especially if they operated at dierent
rates. The safest way through such uncertainties is with
the aid of good case histories. Case histories allow the
principles to be used with confidence.
Case histories that are well written, unambiguous and
factual are the geological calculators for the engineering
geologist because the right case history will go a long
way to providing the right answer to a current question.
No design report should be considered complete without
reference to them. A file of case histories should be on
the desk of every engineering geologist and used as
frequently as the electronic calculator.
The potential for geology to assist engineering exists
at every scale, from regional structures the size of the
London Basin to molecules found on mineral surfaces
and in the aqueous solutions passing over them. There is
435
scope for all interests in geology to contribute to the
advance of engineering.
To realize that potential with the same success as
achieved in the early days of geotechnical engineering
it is necessary to recreate the short and direct links
between practitioner and researcher. Nowadays the
lines of communication can be over-long, weak, broken
by competitiveness and confidentiality, or even non-
existent. The future of engineering geology lies very
largely in the hands of industry and thus there must be a
close and functional communication between industry
and academia. Geotechnical engineers are very good at
overcoming problems but many that are overcome are
left unsolved: the cause of the problem remains to arise
afresh next time similar conditions are encountered;
industry must pass on the problems its shortage of
resources prevents it from solving.
Curiosity-driven research should be seen as the sign
of a healthy research school in geotechnics and an
indication to industry that solutions to their more timely
and pressing problems might well be forthcoming from
such a group.
Acknowledgements. Much of this work would never have been
completed without the practical assistance and intellectual
support of C. Butenuth and G. Butenuth, to whom apprecia-
tion for their help, so generously given over many years, is
readily and gratefully acknowledged. T. Newman (Thames
Water) provided valuable data for the London Basin. R.
McInnes (formerly of Isle of Wight Council) allowed the work
at Ventnor to commence, and P. Marsden (Isle of Wight
Council) assisted its continuation. K. Morton (KLM Consult-
ing) secured illustrations that would otherwise be lost. J.
Cosgrove, J. Hutchinson, D. Potts and R. Sobey, with G.
Hunt, all of Imperial College London, are thanked for their
assistance with this paper, as are R. Goodman (Berkeley) and
H. Einstein (MIT) for their generous assistance with details of
the life and work of Karl Terzaghi. To these names must be
added the countless number of colleagues, largely from
academia but also from industry, who have created the weft
and warp into which my engineering geology could be woven.
There would have been no practical work to report without the
technical and laboratory skills of E. Rogers, B. Clarke, S.
Ackerley, G. Keefe and A. Bolsher. Cohorts of postgraduate
and undergraduate students at college have, over the years,
explored and revealed many aspects of the work described here
and in so doing have maintained, sometimes at their own
expense, a research momentum that would otherwise have
died; it is impossible to thank them adequately. Financial
support has been received from many quarters but especially
from the Natural Environment Research Council, the Engi-
neering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the London
University Central Research Fund, and the Lise Meitner
Stipendium from the Ministerium fr Wissenschaft und For-
schung des Landes Nordrhein Westfalens; without their sup-
port much of the research reported here would not have been
accomplished. K. Junova provided invaluable assistance with
the illustrations, and meticulous reviewing by two anonymous
reviewers greatly improved the text.
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436 M.H. DE FREITAS
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Vote of Thanks
Marcel Arnould
Professeur honoraire, Ecole des Mines et Ecole des Ponts
et Chausses, Paris. Honorary President, International
Association of Engineering Geology and the Environment.
First I pay hommage to the memory of Rudolph
Glossop. I had the chance of meeting him several times
and came to appreciate his charisma, his experience in
professional and scientific aairs, and his engagement in
promoting Engineering Geology. He was a firm sup-
porter of the International Association of Engineering
Geology and of its Bulletin, from their very conception.
My contacts with Michael de Freitas, together with
those of the late John Knill, began with the development
of relations between the School of Mines of Paris and
London, which included an exchange of examiners for
the degree of PhD. These links increased when Michael
moved from the Department of Geology to the Depart-
a key point, whilst he was responsible for the MSc in
Engineering Geology.They resulted in him enrolling me
that I discovered his extraordinary pedagogic talent,
and his dedication to the students.When students were
asked their opinion of the course they replied In this
Masters we work a lot but we learn a lot. We are
satisfied. His scientific studies went in parallel; as
nobody is a prophet in his own country it is in the
French Order of the Palmes Acadmiques that he was
knighted in 2001.
About the Lecture: it is an impressive and magisterial
fresco. Starting from and revisiting the basic principles
of Geology, he embraced all the scales from the field
present such a review. I would select one item to
mention here; the new, original and strongly argued
hypothesis of compartmentalisation of the London
Basin. We should re-check the Paris Basin in the light of
these new findings unless we have evidence to show the
two Basins had a diferent tectonic history from the
Eocene. In Paris there is a distribution of sediments in
the Upper Lutetian making them similar to marquetry,
with considerable variations in thickness occurring over
a few hundred metres. As these variations are associated
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THE NINTH GLOSSOP LECTURE 441

with accumulations of evaporite their origin is attributed We have been privilaged with this richly satisfying
to a palaeogeography of enclosed depressions rather 9th Glossop Lecture. I propose the audience join me
than to a structural cause. The geological history of the in a vote of enthusiastic congratulations and thanks to
Paris Basin should be re-examined. Dr. Michael de Freitas.