Book reviews
'Geophysics in engineering investigations'
P. W. McDowell et al. Geological Society & CIRIA, 2002. £70 softback, 252 pp. ISBN 0 86017 562 6.
Reviewed by:
Dr John M. Reynolds
Reynolds Geo-Sciences Ltd, 2 Long Barn, Pistyll Farm, Nercwys, Mold,
Flintshire, CH7 4EW, UK.
Contact details can be found here.
At last! After over 2½ years of being ‘about to be published’ Geophysics in engineering applications is finally available! Was it worth the wait? We shall see …
The ‘Report’ (not ‘Book’) is the culmination of work from the Working Party on Engineering Geophysics from the Engineering Group of the Geological Society, who had produced the previous equivalent report (QJEG, 21(3):207-271, 1988), in conjunction with several authors commissioned by CIRIA. As tends to happen with publications produced by committee the standard is highly variable and ranges from the very basic to the advanced specialist, from good current thinking to being patently way out of date.
The Report is made up of eleven chapters of which the first describes what the report is, at whom it is aimed, and an explanation of its structure. Chapters 2 to 6 purport to explain geophysics as an investigative tool; procurement, management and reporting; the conceptual ground model; description of geophysical methods; and data acquisition, processing and presentation. Interpretation, arguably the most important facet of geophysics, is barely mentioned. Chapters 7 to 10 describe a variety of applications in geological, geotechnical, geo-environmental, and structural engineering investigations, respectively. The Report’s scope includes land-based, over-water and borehole geophysics. The Report concludes (Chapter 11) with recommendations for good practice.
The best parts of the Report are the discussions on procurement of geophysical services (Chapter 3) that emphasise the use of an Engineering Geophysical Adviser and provide basic information about the contractual settings to produce the best results for ground investigations. These suggestions for good practice are usefully re-emphasised in Section 11.2. There are some helpful descriptions of Non-Destructive Testing and borehole geophysical methods (Chapter 5) that tend not to receive much publicity.
The quality of the figures is highly variable and ranges from the adequate to others that appear to have been produced from poor faxed originals. One figure (Fig. 6.13), for example, is supposed to show the effect of colour scales but has been reproduced in black and white and is totally unreadable!
The Committee producing this Report had a real opportunity to produce a very useful and up-to-date publication that would help towards improving the communication between geophysicists and engineers and that would build upon the 1988 report. The technical sections are incomplete, they omit key new methods that are becoming increasingly used commercially, and the sections on ground penetrating radar are a disgrace. The examples cited might have been at home in the earlier report, but certainly not in one produced in 2002! If this is supposed to be a shop window for what geophysics can do for engineering investigations at the start of the new millennium it is very wide of the mark.
Poor quality figures and variable content render this publication significantly no more useful that its 1988 forebear. Its only redeeming features are the discussion on contractual matters and guidance for good practice. So was the Report worth the wait? No! And neither is it worth the £70 price tag.
For publication in the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology.
© RIL, 2010. All rights reserved.
