ABSTRACT
When dealing with nature’s natural building material, soil, the environmental engineer (including any engineer or responsible person in charge … of anything) should keep the following statement in mind:
If a man from today were transported back in time to a particular location, he would instantly recognize the massive structure before him, even though he might be taken aback at what he was seeing: a youthful mountain range with considerable mass, steep sides, and a height that certainly reached beyond any cloud. He would instantly relate to one particular peak-the tallest, most massive one. The polyhedron-shaped object, with its polygonal base and triangular faces culminating in a single sharp-tipped apex, would look familiar-comparable in shape, but larger in size, to the largest of the Great Egyptian Pyramids, although the Pyramids were originally covered in a sheet of limestone, not the thick, perpetual sheet of solid ice and snow covering this mountain peak.
