Special Issue on Environmental Geotechnology: Contemporary Issues

This special issue of the International Journal of Geomechanics (IJOG) is dedicated to the 12th Conference of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG) held in Goa, India, October 1–6, 2008, with the theme of “Geomechanics in the Emerging Social and Technological Age.” From 1,200 abstracts from 52 countries spanning all continents, 604 papers were selected for inclusion in the conference proceedings, which had 550 participants.

After carefully going through the papers related to geoenvironmental engineering and flow and contaminant transport in porous media, giving due consideration to scientific merit and originality, eight papers that are within the scope of IJOG have been selected for this special issue. These papers deal with contemporary issues such as thermo-hydro-mechanical modeling of geomaterials, suction measurement of soils, coupled phenomenon of consolidation and contaminant transport in porous media, and large strain settling behavior of polymer-amended slurries.

We are very thankful to Dragan Komljenovic, Won Taek Oh, George Tsiambaos, Sarat Das, Louis Ge, Christianne de Lyra Nogueira, Wei Wang, Yunming Yang, Mohamed A. Meguid, G. L. S. Babu Gandluri, Daichao Sheng, Zenghe Xu, Usama El Shamy, Zejia Liu, Charles Augarde, Koji Uenishi, George Tsiambaos, Usama El Shamy, Junsheng Yang, Grayeli Roozbeh, William Pariseau, Ove Jörgen Stephansson, Tiago Miranda, Ludvik Trauner, and Bojan Zlender for reviewing the papers included in this issue. We also thank the authors for extending their fullest cooperation in preparing the revised manuscripts to the IJOG guidelines and taking into account the additional review comments.

The editors acknowledge the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG) for the approval for publication of the papers contained in this special issue, which were adapted from the proceedings of the 12th IACMAG conference in Goa, India.