We present an adapted translation of the report “Site investigation as tool for elimination of natural hazard impacts on construction projects” (Pospisil, Rozsypal, 2017), which was made by Czech geotechnicians in Prague at the International “Building up efficient and sustainable transport infrastructure 2017” (BESTInfra2017). This review paper was also published as an article in the journal “Materials Science and Engineering” by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Pospisil, Rozsypal, 2017) for the presented translation is given in the end. Natural hazards and their impacts on traffic structures represent the most risk factor during the construction phase and maintenance of traffic structures. The article deals with the process of site investigation focused on elimination of natural hazard impacts on the structures. It is described the importance of gradual assessment especially of rock environment conditions in relation to a specific traffic structure. A significant role plays the cooperation between foundation designers and site investigators especially for right classification of the geotechnical category and final determination of the characteristic values for documented rock formations. The positive and negative roles of standardized approaches included in various standards are also considered.

The Research and Educational Center (REC) at the Research Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Channel Processes of the Faculty of Geography of Lomonosov Moscow State University forms a professional community. The REC was created a year ago. Through online events and professional programs of additional education, its organizers introduce students, graduate students, young scientists and experienced practitioners to each other. Among the audience there are schoolchildren and inquisitive citizens interested in natural sciences. This article will focus on an online meeting on the topic “Engineering methods to fight against erosion”. Svetlana Yausheva, PhD, technical support specialist for the GEO5complex of autonomous programs for geotechnical calculations, told about what traditional and new measures existed for the protection against erosion and what an engineer should do if it is important to know a lot, but there is lack of time.

Debts tend to become a permanent part of the business or appear from where they were not expected. A long-time conscientious partner suddenly becomes a defaulter. He behaves this way not because he has lost his conscience, but because he has been in the clutches of another defaulter. The chain of participants in the resulting receivables can be long. It also contains sonorous names of monopoly companies. Cooperation with them does not guarantee that everything will be smooth with payments. In this article, the editorial staff of the “Geoinfo” journal has collected some stories about how and why debts arose, and what contractors did to bring customers to their proper levels. Some experts also have told how to behave in a dual role when somebody owes you and you owe somebody, and how to restore your reputation if you are considered a persistent non-payer.

The editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal have collected information on the ways to prevent receivables and on the activities if such a situation has arisen. This paper uses materials from the online forum “Receivables. The fight for liquidity” (organized by the “Financial Director” journal), as well as the results of a poll (conducted by the editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal) of company managers and lawyers specializing in disputes that arise in the construction sphere.

The Central Bank of Russia, which raised the key rate to 16%, is in no hurry to change it. This has led to numerous predictions about what will happen to inflation, prices, and credits. Optimistic economists say that the inflation will decrease in the second quarter of 2024. Pessimistic ones say that nothing will change until the middle of the year. In any case, the growth of prices will continue, except that its speed will be various. The inflation often depreciates any efforts to deal with receivables because there are payments that stretch over months and even years. And the price of this money will no longer be the same as it was during the engineering survey work. It is more profitable to prevent receivables than to correct the situation later. Artem Kiyaev, the founder of “TsIIAK” LLC (Krasnodar), told the correspondent of the “Geolnfo” journal how to do this.

In the federal budget for 2024, the government has planned a sharp increase in revenues and expenses. The state treasury is expected to receive 35.1 trillion rubles, and 36.7 trillion rubles will be spent. About 40% of the amount will be allocated to the defense and security of the country. Officials are going to fill the budget with increased taxes, fees, fines. And they will save money on digital development and new construction. The latter fact worried representatives of the construction industry from the very beginning (from the moment when the draft law on the new federal budget was published). The public outcry did not subside throughout the entire time while the main financial document of the country was being discussed. The final optimistic comments of market participants boil down to the fact that you can live in peace, without looking into the prospect of two or three years, when the reduction in the number of objects with budget financing will become noticeable. In this paper, we will tell you how exactly and on which national projects the state has decided to save money, and what was responded to the request of the editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal by representatives of the Construction Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation.

The Collins Dictionary named Al (artificial intelligence) as the word of 2023. The term “neural networks” is often used as a synonym. But that is not entirely true. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science dealing with the creation of computer systems that can simulate human intelligence. Al can be implemented in various ways, including neural networks, genetic algorithms, machine learning methods, etc. That is, neural networks are one of the ways to implement Al, i. e. they are computer models that simulate the functioning of the human nervous system and consist of many interconnected nodes (“neurons”) that can transmit information to each other and process it. During 2023, mentions of Al have quadrupled in publications and on the Internet because Al has also become a kind of entertainment. And the government and big business predict great prospects for neural networks. In this article we will tell you what experts think about the use of artificial intelligence in engineering surveys and design, what they talk about Al at business events, how Al can make work of people easier, where the risks lie, what are the near-term prospects, and why the state encourages this technology.

Today, the market leader in drilling equipment for engineering surveys and geological exploration is V.V. Vorovsky United Drilling Equipment Plants [OZBT]. This group of companies includes “ZBT” LLC, V.V. Vorovsky Plant, and “Geomash” JSC. Last year, the manufacturer pleased engineering surveyors with a new product such as a self-propelled crawler trolley on which a PBU drilling rig can be installed. This technical solution can significantly reduce the cost of the rig together with chassis (the price of the chassis seriously grew, especially in the past year). There are other innovations as well. For example, the drilling computer has been seriously improved, it has been possible to install a box van on a chassis. This year it is planned to increase the production volume of drilling tools and improve the level of service significantly. Roman Kondrat’ev, the head of V.V. Vorovsky OZBT, has told the editorial staff of the “Geoinfo” journal about all of this and much more.

Personnel shortages force companies to reduce the requirements for applicants, increase salaries, soften working conditions, and give more freedom. It is impossible to refuse prohibitions, because they are necessary to ensure order in enterprises and are required by law. Inevitably, there will be some bosses forbidding something beyond measure and employees considering any restrictions as arbitrariness and invasions of privacy. The editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal asked some experts about what the prohibitions should be, how to convey them to personnel so that they are correctly perceived, and what concessions companies agree to make so that people don’t quit.

In connection with the quantitative growth of civil, industrial, and infrastructure construction in Russia, there is a long overdue need to create a professional association of technical customers to work on building uniform and transparent rules for the provision of engineering services. To solve these problems, the association “National unification of Technical Customers and Other Organizations in the Field of Engineering and Construction Management” (“NOTEH” association) was created. It was registered by the Ministry of Justice of the RF on December 26, 2023. Its founders were 16 leading Russian engineering and consulting companies. In the near future and later, new members will join the association. The “NOTEH” association will develop a unified voluntary standard for the activities of a technical customer, general approaches to determining its functional and qualification requirements, and mechanisms for insuring risks and liability.

2024 is an anniversary year for the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM). Fifty years ago, that construction project in the wild taiga was declared an all-Union Komsomol top-priority one. That was one of many competent management decisions, without which the rails would not been laid among the taiga and mountains, on permafrost (however, in construction on permafrost, due to inexperience, a number of mistakes were made that have been correcting up to now. – Ed.). That construction project was not only very well supplied, but also advertised so well that people rushed to the edge of the world to show their worth, even waited in line. In the Union republics, the competition to get into the first Komsomol parties reached up to 20 people per one place. Republics and regions patronized stations and villages along BAM and competed with each other. They created those objects from scratch, took care of everything such as engineering survey, design, supply of materials, dispatch of specialists, design and decoration of stations (often in national traditions). And they tried to do everything qualitatively and quickly. In difficult climatic conditions, in forests and mountains, engineering technologies were often invented on the spot. Foreign experts were amazed and went there to adopt the experience. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the public attitude towards BAM changed from plus to minus, then again from minus to plus. But the friendship of the BAM pioneers remained unchanged; they continued to consider that construction project great and well-organized one. Scattered local associations of BAM builders gradually united into the all- Russian public organization “BAM Commonwealth”. It was registered by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in 2021 and began preparing for the half-century anniversary of BAM. The celebrations will be both similar and different from past anniversaries. There will be an awards ceremony for “50 years of BAM” medals. There will be a special train from Moscow to Tymda with concerts at the stations. A business program will be organized. In this paper we will tell about the organization of that construction project on the basis of archival materials, which were provided to the editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal by employees of the Museum of the History of BAM in the city of Tymda, the State Treasury Institution of the Rostov Region “Center for the Contemporary History Documentation of the Rostov Region” and the all-Russian public organization “BAM Commonwealth”.

You can not do without contractors in construction, because you can not embrace the immensity. Absolutely all the companies that have decided to do everything on their own eventually will abandon this idea and hire someone. To choose a suitable contractor, you need to know not only your tasks, maximal deadlines and budget clearly, but also assess the price range, understand what determines the price of the survey, make sure the contractor’s integrity, competence and ability to perform the work that will be assigned to him. To choose a suitable contractor, you need to know not only your tasks, maximal deadlines and budget clearly, but also assess the price range, understand what determines the price of the survey, make sure the contractor’s integrity, competence and ability to perform the work that will be assigned to him. Such a thoughtful search takes a lot of time. IT specialists have developed software for conducting tenders. Today, there are many services designed for construction, and they are in demand. Automation has indeed made customers’ lives easier, but it has not completely eliminated the routine. You still need to think before making a decision. Market participants learn from their own and others’ mistakes. The editorial staff of the “Geolnfo” journal asked customers what guides them when choosing contractors for engineering survey work, how they react to low and high prices, what they can recommend to colleagues who organize tenders or participate in them.

In modern megacities, there have been less and less sites for new construction, and these sites in most cases have limited areas and are surrounded by existing buildings and structures. At the same time, buildings and structures having reduced base areas permit to save space. Therefore, in the last few year, the need for vertical structures has been growing particularly rapidly. In the transport construction sphere, the trends are similar. In almost all the regions of Russia, the number of highways with multi-level interchanges, trestles, and overpasses has been increasing. And in most cases, vertical or nearly vertical retaining walls are required for the construction of such sort of structures. The international company “Officine Maccaferri Spa” (“Maccaferri”) has extensive experience in research, design and development of technical solutions with the use of retaining walls, including in constraint conditions. The editorial staff of the “Geoinfo” journal talked about those solutions with Ivan Kuklo, Marketing Director of the “Gabions Maccaferri CIS” LLC.

Today, Glavgosexpertiza of Russia (State Expert Evaluation Department of Russia) is one of the most progressive departments in the construction industry, which not only actively develops and implements advanced approaches and technologies, but also steadily improves the quality of construction processes. Activities of Glavgosexpertiza includes all the following: cost estimate rationing, checking projects for compliance with regulatory documents, identifying critical errors, expert support that makes it possible to implement projects most efficiently, participation in the gradual elimination of unscrupulous prospectors and designers, introducing machine- readable formats and artificial intelligence. Igor’ Manylov, the head of the Glavgosexpertiza of Russia, answered the questions of the editorial staff of the “Geoinfo” journal about the department’s tasks, its vision of the the problems of the construction industry and of the ways to solve them.

One of the most urgent and important problems in the field of safety of human and infrastructure safety in Russia is the engineering protection against snow avalanches, mudflows and landslides, including rockfalls. These dangerous natural phenomena can lead to serious consequences such as injuries and deaths of people, significant material losses, and environmental problems. However, despite the importance of this problem, it is often underestimated or not taken into account at all. But its solution is absolutely necessary and requires a deep and systematic approach.

Engineering surveyors, who do not have a special geodetic education, often experience difficulties when converting coordinates from one system to another. There are also many questions about coordinate systems in general and about the limits of their applicability. In this regard, this paper discusses the main modern terrestrial geodetic coordinate systems, the limits of their applicability and their purposes. A detailed algorithm for the conversion from the WGS-84 coordinate system to local coordinate systems of the Russian Federation is provided. The open interactive web service named wgs-msk.soilbox.app was created on the basis of the performed calculations. An assessment of the accuracy of the recalculation is provided.

The results of dynamic frozen soil tests are difficult to find in the Russian scientific publications. However, frozen soils dynamic characteristics can affect the operation of buildings. Russian researchers have little test experience, no proper equipment and research methods. And that does not allow them to obtain accurate dynamic properties of frozen soils. To study this issue, a series of articles has been prepared, the first of which shows the dynamic properties of frozen soils on the basis of resonant column tests, presents a literary review of foreign scientists’ publications on the considered topic from 1960–1980 to the present time, their analysis and generalization. The article shows the influence of temperature, humidity, composition, density and vibration amplitude of frozen soil on its dynamic shear modulus and damping ratio. A comparison of the dynamic properties of frozen soils and unfrozen ones is made, the influence of the temperature of frozen soils on their dynamic characteristics is estimated. At low negative temperatures that are from minus 10 °C to minus 3 °C, dynamic shear modulus is on average 3000–900 MPa, at temperatures that are higher than minus 2 °C its value decreases to 500–90 MPa. The damping ratio of frozen soils at a temperature of on average minus 5 °C and higher is 0.08–0.12, at a temperature of minus 10 °C and lower it is 0.05–0.07.

We present to the attention of the readers a slightly abridged and adapted translation of the paper “An experimental study to mitigate swelling pressure of expansive Tabuk shale, Saudi Arabia” by Egyptian engineering geologists (Embaby et al., 2017). This paper was published by the WASET publishing house in the International Journal of Geological and Environmental Engineering. It is an open access article under the CC BY SA 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, modified, refined, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted, the original source and license are referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Embaby et al., 2017) for the presented translation is given in the end. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there are several areas where expansive soil exists in the form of variable-thicknesses layers in the developed regions. Severe distress to infrastructures can be caused by the development of heave and swelling pressure in this kind of expansive shale. Among the various techniques for expansive soil mitigation, the removal and replacement technique is very popular for lightly loaded structures and shallow foundations. This paper presents the result of an experimental study conducted for evaluating the effect of the type and thickness of the cushion soils on the mitigation of swelling characteristics of the expanded shale. Seven undisturbed shale samples collected from the Al Qadsiyah district, which is located in the Tabuk town in the north of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were treated with two types of cushions of coarse-grained sediments (CCS) (sand and gravel). The both types had thicknesses of 22, 33 and 44% in relation to the initial height of the sample (which would be in relation to the depth of the active zone of the shale from its top in the field conditions). The test results indicated that the replacement of the expansive shale by CCS reduced the swelling potential and swelling pressure. It was found that the reduction in the swelling depended on the type and thickness of CCS. The treatment by removing the original expansive shale and replacing it by a sand cushion, which was 44% thick, reduced the swelling potential and pressure. The values of the reduction were about 53.29 and 62.78 %, respectively.

The article considers the features of natural ecological-geological systems (EGS) of loess ground masses of the elementary level. They are widespread in the territory of Belarus. Despite the fact that these systems cover significant areas in the territory of the republic, they have remained practically unstudied. There is only fragmentary scattered information about their abiotic and biotic components. On the basis of the EGS classification for the Belarus territory, which was previously developed by the authors, this article attempts to characterize them generally, as well as to identify and describe the features of their abiotic (lithotope, hydrotope, edaphotope) and biotic (microbocenosis, phytocenosis, zoocenosis) components.

We present an adapted translation of the paper “Carbon dioxide release from retrogressive thaw slumps in Siberia” by German researchers (Beer et al., 2023). This paper was published in the “Environmental Research Letters” journal by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Beer et al., 2023) for the presented translation is given in the end. Thawing of ice-rich permafrost soils in sloped terrain can lead to activation of retrogressive thaw slumps (RTSs) which make organic matter available for decomposition that has been frozen for centuries to millennia. Recent studies show that the area affected by RTSs increased in the last two decades across the pan-Arctic. Combining a model of soil carbon dynamics with remotely sensed spatial details of thaw slump area and a soil carbon database, the authors show that RTSs in Siberia turned a previous quasi-neutral ecosystem into a strong source of carbon dioxide (on the average 367±213 g of carbon atoms from 1 m2 of RTS per a year). On a global scale, recent emissions from Siberian thaw slumps of 0.42±0.22 Tg carbon per a year have been negligible so far. However, depending on the future evolution of permafrost thaw and hence thaw slump-affected area, such hillslope processes can transition permafrost landscapes to become a major source of additional CO2 release into the atmosphere.