Article

The influence of geology on the expansive potential of soil profiles

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Abstract

A survey of 446 brick-veneer, single-family homes in College Station, Beaumont, San Antonio, and Waco, Texas, shows that the geology of the home site greatly influences the expansive potential of a soil profile. Effective plasticity index is used as a measure of a soil's shrink-swell potential; however in College Station the geological conditions provided subsurface wetting fronts which greatly enhanced the shrink-swell activity at low values of effective plasticity index. In Beaumont, San Antonio, and Waco, the depth of the active zone is important in controlling the expansive potential of the soil profile. -from Authors

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... Such a physical process has been recognized as one of the causal factors of landslide development on slopes (Popescu 2002). Expansive clay in the active zone (usually to a depth of 1.5 m), which is also known as the crack-rich zone (Mathewson and Dobson 1982), swells and shrinks due to the seasonal moisture variations. In particular, failures are common in this zone due to precipitation and longterm atmospheric drying and wetting cycles that reduces the shear strength of the topsoils (Puppala et al. 2013;Meisina 2006). ...
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