The engineering properties of glacial tills

Abstract

Glacial tills are a product of the glacial processes of erosion, transportation and deposition and could have been subjected to several glacial cycles and periglacial processes to the extent that they are complex, hazardous soils that are spatially variable in composition, structure, fabric and properties, making them very difficult to sample, test and classify. An overview of the formation of glacial tills and their properties shows that they are composite soils which should be classified according to their lithology, their mode of deposition to link the glacial processes with the facies characteristics and their engineering behaviour. This enables representative design properties to be assigned using frameworks developed for composite soils.