The State of Engineering Geology Education in Australia

Introduction – what does an engineering geologist need to know?

This editorial is about the education of engineering geology in Australia, or perhaps more pertinently the lack of it. It discusses how we currently educate engineering geologists in Australia, the lack of practitioners in our industry who arrive through a geoscience education pathway, how we can meet our skills demand in engineering geology through better education and what the barriers are to improving the current situation.

Before discussing the state of engineering geology education in Australia, it is first necessary to establish what an engineering geologist does and what knowledge and skills our education system needs to impart to them – a simple question with many answers if one is to look hard enough into the literature. But let’s go with a 1962 quote from one of the founders of Engineering Geology in Australia, Daniel Moye (see cover photo) which encapsulates it nicely:

Engineering geology in practice is a service to civil engineering (including the civil aspects of mining engineering). The engineering geologist should be, first and foremost, a well-trained geologist. However, there are very few engineers qualified to specify in detail the nature of the geological services they require. So to be fully effective, the engineering geologist should have sufficient insight into the nature of engineering problems to be able on the one hand to recognise and select for investigation the geological factors which are significant to particular engineering projects, and, on the other hand, to avoid wasted effort on irrelevant aspects of geology. Further, he should be able to communicate the geological information for the engineer in terms which can be understood and used, otherwise his work is sterile.

It is considered therefore that the systematic study of engineering geology should be deferred until the student has the required background in geology, i.e. after a 3-year course.

– Daniel George Moye, 1962

Ignoring the 1962 gender references (we have come a long way), according to this definition, we could say that Engineering Geology is rooted in geological science or geoscience, but it is a science that helps solve engineering problems. One might infer from this that the skills of the engineering geologist transcend the realms of both science and engineering, and so one educated as an engineering geologist might require skills in both the fields of engineering and science. That’s the premise with which we will approach this review of Australian education in engineering geology. We’ll return to the part of the quote about studying engineering geology after a three year geology course.

The Australian Geomechanics Society is one of the few geotechnical societies in the world that brings together engineering geology, soil mechanics and rock mechanics under one association, by being the Australian member society of the IAEG, ISSMGE and ISRM. This is done under the all encompassing term of ‘geomechanics’. It is debatable as to whether ‘geomechanics’ is an appropriate term to encompass all these disciplines. Perhaps ‘ground engineering’, or ‘geotechnics’ could be alternative terms, but to be consistent with the name of our society, I’ll adopt the term geomechanics in this editorial as an overarching term that encompasses all the knowledge and skills needed to understand and control ground response to human activities. However, substitute whichever term you prefer.

The importance of geoscience to geomechanics has been recognised since the dawn of the profession. If Karl Terzaghi was the father of soil mechanics, let’s not forget that his wife, Ruth was an eminent geologist and one of the early engineering geologists. Perhaps that makes her the mother of modern engineering geology. However, the criticality of the union between geotechnical engineering and geology has long been recognised.

The geotechnical engineer should apply theory and experimentation but temper them by putting them into the context of the uncertainty of nature. Judgement enters through engineering geology.

– Karl Terzaghi

John Burland recognised that geomechanics broadly requires 3 key inputs, being knowledge of the ground profile, knowledge of material behaviour and an appropriate model, as set out in his famous Geotechnical Triangle (Figure 1) with ‘ground profile’ which would seem to lie firmly in the realm of engineering geology and which occupies a prominent corner of the triangle. This implies that without some knowledge of the ground profile, geomechanics (Burland uses the term geotechnical), cannot happen. With reference to the geotechnical triangle, whilst the geological sciences are important for establishing the ground profile, it can be strongly argued that they are also necessary inputs to the other corners of the triangle. For example, to understand material behaviour, a knowledge of past ground behaviour is vital, and developing an appropriate model requires geoscience as discussed in the recently published IAEG guidelines for engineering geological models (Baynes and Parry 2022, see synopsis in this volume). The geosciences are a necessary input to all parts of the geotechnical triangle and so vital for geomechanics.

Brunsden in his 2002 Glossop lecture used the term ‘Core Geo Team’ to represent all the skills required for geomechanics, breaking those skills down into 4 broad categories; soil mechanics, rock mechanics, engineering geology and engineering geomorphology (Figure 2). He notes that these skills are all vital inputs into civil engineering, and notably to all stages of civil engineering from planning to decommissioning.