Abstract
The requirement for sub-sea soils data is paramount for the siting of gravity structures, pile founded structures, mobi1 drill rigs, selection of pipeline routes and depths of burial, anchoring of vessels, running of preconductors and a myriad of other associated problems.
Properties of soils that are highly important in a design process are shear strength, water content, grain size distribution, consolidation characteristics and density. A number of investigations have attempted to relate these soil properties to acoustic properties such as compression wave velocity and reflectivity coefficients as part of the ongoing efforts to determine soil foundation properties indirectly.
This paper: a) reviews soil data gathering efforts from conventional boring programs as a demonstration of how ground truth measurements are obtained; b) discusses in-situ tests which develop direct information; and c) present some of the more meaningful efforts at acoustic methods for determining soil parameters including correlations where they exist. The resulting stratigraphic correlations are useful in siting of platforms, routing of pipelines and in determining approximate settlement of structures.
