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State-of-the-art report

Penetration testing in Canada

W.J. Eden

Because of the size of the country and the variety of soil conditions encountercd, it ia difficult to give morę than a sketchy overview of the situa-tion regarding penetration testing in Canada.

This paper consists of brief notes on the geolog-ical conditions, a review of recent Canadian literaturę on the topie and an outline of some current research work on penetration testing known to the writer.

Geological Conditions

The landma8s of Canada amounts to 9.960,000 sq. km. (3,846,000 sq. mi.) and extends from latitude 42°N in Southern Ontario to 83®N on Ellesmere Island and from longitude 52°W at St. John's, Newfoundland, to 141 *W on the Yukon-Alaska boundary. There are 6 main geographic regions: the Appalachian Region in Eastern Canada, the St. Lawrence lowlands of Ontario and Ouebec, the Laurentian shield centred about Hudson Bay and embracing nearly half of the landma88, the interior plains of Western Canada, the Cordillera along the West Coast, and the Arctic Archipelago madę up of the lalands in the Arctic Ocean west of Greenland. Almost all the landmasB (the exception being some areas of the

Arctic) have been subjected to action of a Continental ice sheet in the Wisconsin glacial stage (Fig. 1) of the Pleistocene epoch (Prest 1961). The ice sheet caused major disruptions in the pre-existing drainage system and left a mantle of glacial tiil in most areas. Following the re-treat of the Wisconsin ice sheet, large areas were submerged by the sea or covered by large glacial lakes. The extent of these areas is shown in Fig. 2. In some areas, such as the St. Lawrence lowlands, the marinę and lacus-trine deposits extend to a depth of 100 m. (300 ft.) or morę.

A third very significant factor in Canada is the presence of permafrost conditions. Figurę 3, from Crawford and Johnston (1971), shows that about one half of the land area is underlain by permafrost in either the continuous or discon-tinuous condition. The presence of permafrost greatly complicates soil exploration procedures, To datę there have not been sufficient studies to establish penetration testing as a reliable tool for assessing the properties of frozen soil encountered in permafrost areas.

Fig. 1

Pleistocene glaciation in northern North America (Prest 1961)