Fundamental Soil Mechanics - Mathematics and Statistics for the Environment - page 305

12 Fundamental Soil Mechanics
When dealing with nature's natural building material, soil, the environmental engineer (including
any engineer or responsible person in charge … of anything) should keep the following statement
in mind:
Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing
Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.
—Marcus Aurelius ( Meditations )
12.1 INTRODUCTION *
If a man from today were transported back in time to a particular location, he would instantly
recognize the massive structure before him, even though he might be taken aback at what he
was seeing: a youthful mountain range with considerable mass, steep sides, and a height that
certainly reached beyond any cloud. He would instantly relate to one particular peak—the tallest,
most massive one. The polyhedron-shaped object, with its polygonal base and triangular faces
culminating in a single sharp-tipped apex, would look familiar—comparable in shape, but larger
in size, to the largest of the Great Egyptian Pyramids, although the Pyramids were originally
covered in a sheet of limestone, not the thick, perpetual sheet of solid ice and snow covering this
mountain peak.
If that same man were to walk this same site today, if he knew what had once stood upon this site,
the changes would be obvious and startling—and entirely relative to time. Otherwise, he wouldn't
give a second thought while walking across its remnants and through the vegetation growing from
its pulverized and amended remains. Over 300 million years ago, the pyramid-shaped mountain
peak stood in full, unchallenged splendor above the clouds, wrapped in a cloak of ice, a mighty for-
tress of stone, seemingly vulnerable to nothing, standing tallest of all—higher than any mountain
ever stood—or will ever stand—on Earth.
And so it stood, for millions upon millions of passings of the Earth around the sun. Born when
Mother Earth took a deep breath, the pyramid-shaped peak stood tall and undisturbed until mil-
lions of years later, when Mother Earth stretched. Today we would call this stretch a massive earth-
quake, although humans have never witnessed one of such magnitude. Rather than registering on
the Richter scale, it would have destroyed it.
When this massive earthquake shattered the Earth's surface, nothing we would call intelligent
life lived on Earth—and it's a good thing. During this massive upheaval, the peak shook to its
very foundations, and after the initial shockwave and hundreds of aftershocks, the solid granite
structure was fractured. This immense fracture was so massive that each aftershock widened it
and loosened the base foundation of the pyramid-shaped peak itself. Only 10,000 years later (a
* Introduction adapted from Spellman, F.R. and Stoudt, M.L., Environmental Science , Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD,
2013.
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