Geophysical analysis of the soils for civil (Geotechnical) engineering and urban planning purposes: Some case histories from Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this study is to review the geophysical investigations in civil engineering and urban planning by some case histories in Turkey. Geophysics deals with a wide array of earth phenomena, including the temperature distribution of the earth's interior (the source, configuration and variations of the geomagnetic field) and the large-scale features of the terrestrial crust, such as rifts, continental sutures and mid-oceanic ridges. From the geophysical point of view, civil engineering and urban planning includes several geophysical topics used to investigate the physical properties, the physical techniques for regional and local land use planning or micro-zonation, the natural disaster risk estimation studies, etc. In this study, the geophysical approach, regarding civil engineering and urban planning against the natural or artificial disaster risk in macro (human/nature) and micro (society/earth) scales, is given. Geophysical methods provide solutions to a wide range of geotechnical problems: Slope stability, soil liquefaction and amplification studies, site investigations and testing, water works, subways, etc. In this study, an evaluation of the geophysical methods applied to geotechnical problems related to the soils is presented. Soils consist of the products of physical and chemical weathering of the rocks of the earth’s crust. As a part of the engineering design, the aim of a site/soil investigation is to provide the basic data to evaluate the interaction of the natural environment with the proposed structure. As it is known, using physical measurements in geophysics, it is studied as the natural and artificially generated physical fields of the earth. Key words: Geotechnical engineering, geophysics, earthquake engineering, soils, soil dynamics.