Sandcastle engineering – a geotechnical engineer explains how water, air and sand create solid structures

By Joseph Scalia, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University

If you want to understand why some sandcastles are tall and have intricate structures while others are nearly shapeless lumps of sand, it helps to have a background in geotechnical engineering.

As a geotechnical engineering educator myself, I use sandcastles in the classroom to explain how interactions of soil, water and air make it possible to rebuild landscapes after mining metals critical to…

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