Underground metalliferous mining in Australia began in the mid-1840s at the copper and silver–lead mines in and around Kapunda and Burra in South Australia. Mining in the Victorian goldfields following the discovery of gold and the Gold Rush of 1851 was initially alluvial but soon evolved into the underground mining of deep leads and then quartz veins.

The Italian Conference of Researchers in Geotechnical Engineering—CNRIG— reached this year its seventh edition, three years after the successful conference held in Bologna in 2016. The conference was promoted by the National Group of Geotechnical Engineering (GNIG; http://www.gnig.it/) and hosted by Politecnico di Milano (https://www.polimi.it/) at the campus in Lecco (Polo Territoriale di Lecco, http://www.polo-lecco.polimi.it/en). The conference provides an important opportunity to share scientific advances, innovation, and application in geotechnical engineering and is becoming a traditional event for the Italian geotechnical community. <...>

The foundations will affect how the other elements of a building perform and so can be a major factor in determining whether or not the building achieves its intended purpose with satisfactory long-term performance. However, decisions concerning the foundations for low-rise buildings are often made by people involved in planning and other aspects of the building development who have little formal training in geotechnical engineering. This book has been written for the benefit of such people and their non-specialist professional advisors; these include architects, surveyors, loss adjusters, planners, insurance underwriters and property developers, most of whom are likely to have only a limited understanding of the engineering of the ground. The book brings together a large quantity of material relevant to building foundations published by BRE over many years. This introductory chapter defines the scope of the book.  <...>

Comparison of vibrocompaction methods by numerical simulations

Settlement predictions of embankments on organic soils in engineering practice

Installation effects of vibro replacement stone columns in soft clay

Soil fracturing of soft silty clays for the reinforcement of a bell tower foundation

Modelling of soft ground consolidation via combined surcharge and vacuum preloading

Enhanced viscoplastic modelling of soft soils

Modelling the influence of density and bonding on geomaterials

Some experiences from full-scale test embankments on floating lime-cement columns

3D numerical modelling of the behaviour of large buildings founded on Mexico City soft clays