Professor John Burland, CBE, DSc(Eng), FREng, FRS is a world-leading Geotechnical Engineer and Emeritus Professor at Imperial College. His work has taken him to many parts of the world, working on hundreds of fascinating projects.

Have you ever read LIVIC before?

I am mortified to admit that I haven’t  - but now I have the link!  Has every member of staff been bombarded with it? – they should be. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

John Burland at the Leaning Tower of Pisa

What is your current favourite engineering project?

Crossrail. It has almost every civil engineering challenge...

The following is a guest article by Áine Ní Bhreasaíl

Freezing soil causes cracks to appear in buildings and lumps in roads. It’s not just the 9% expansion of water when it freezes to ice that that causes the ground to heave in this way, it is also the freezing and thawing of ice lenses, segregated bands of ice within the soil, which cause movement many times greater than 9%.The threat from ice lenses is significant. In 1966 20 people died when a building affected by soil freezing and thawing collapsed in Noril’sk in Russia. The extent of ice lens related damage to infrastructure and...