About Marine Geotechnics

Marine Geotechnics

Marine Geotechnics is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal published in Beijing by KeAi Communications, with publishing services by Elsevier, that publishes high-quality research on the geotechnical aspects of coastal and offshore systems. It serves as a forum for advancing the fundamental understanding and engineering application of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering in the marine environment, disseminating cutting-edge research on the design, analysis and performance of foundations, anchors, pipelines, underwater tunnels and other seabed infrastructure, with emphasis on safety, sustainability and reliability. A key focus is on applications supporting the safe and sustainable development of marine energy systems, alongside deep-sea resource extraction, subsea infrastructure and coastal resilience.

The journal describes itself as a crucial conduit between fundamental research and practical engineering solutions, committed to solving the complex challenges inherent in engineering on and within the coastal ground or seabed. That positioning matters: offshore wind farms, floating production systems, subsea cables, cross-sea bridges and tunnels and deep-sea mining all ultimately rest on — or anchor into — seabed soils whose behaviour under waves, currents, earthquakes and cyclic loading is difficult and expensive to investigate. Marine Geotechnics gives that specialist community, which sits between soil mechanics, ocean engineering and geology, a dedicated open-access home within the KeAi portfolio, the Beijing-based joint venture of China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier that now publishes more than 280 scholarly journals.

Site Characterisation and Geomaterials

The journal's first topic area is marine site characterisation and marine geomaterials behaviour: advanced in-situ and laboratory testing, innovative geophysical methods, and constitutive modelling of geomaterials under complex loading conditions. Before anything is built offshore, the seabed must be investigated — its strata mapped, its sediments sampled and tested, its strength and stiffness measured under the kinds of loading it will actually experience. This area therefore covers the cone penetration tests, sampling campaigns, geophysical surveys and laboratory programmes that precede design, and the mathematical models that turn their results into predictions of how marine soils — soft clays, sands, carbonates and more — deform and fail.

Foundations, Anchors and Subsea Lines

Three topic areas cover the structures themselves. Offshore and subsea foundations addresses the analysis, design and performance of shallow and deep foundations — piles, caissons and gravity bases among them — for all types of marine structures, including energy, industrial and scientific platforms. Anchoring and mooring systems covers the geotechnical design and analysis of drag, plate and pile anchors for floating structures such as floating production storage and offloading vessels (FPSOs), floating cities, renewable energy platforms and aquaculture farms — the fast-growing class of structures that float but must not drift. The geotechnics of subsea linear infrastructure covers the design, installation and stability of submarine pipelines, risers and power and data cables, including cable–seabed interaction, trenching and burial: the unglamorous but critical question of how lines laid on or under the seabed stay where they were put.

Coasts, Crossings and Floating Tunnels

Coastal and nearshore geotechnical engineering covers the analysis of coastal processes, land reclamation, port and harbour infrastructure, breakwaters and foundations — the interface where marine geotechnics meets the built coastline. Two further areas address crossings. The geotechnics of cross-sea passages covers the challenges of immersed tunnels, sea-crossing bridges and artificial islands, structures of particular prominence in China, where some of the world's longest sea crossings have been built. Submerged floating tunnels receive their own area: the geotechnical aspects of foundation and anchoring systems for these proposed tubes, suspended in the water column, including soil–structure interaction under hydrodynamic and seismic loads. Few journals give submerged floating tunnels a named place in their scope; its presence signals the journal's forward-looking engineering remit.

Resources, Storage, Hazards and New Ocean Uses

The geotechnics of subsea resources and storage covers geotechnical solutions for deep-sea mining, methane hydrate exploitation, offshore geothermal energy, subsea hydrogen storage and carbon capture and storage (CCS) — the seabed as a source of resources and as a reservoir for energy transition technologies. Marine geo-hazards and environmental geotechnics covers the assessment, forecasting and mitigation of hazards including submarine landslides, tsunamis, seismic risks and scour, together with the environmental impact of marine geotechnical activities. A further area, novel ocean space utilisation, addresses geotechnical challenges from emerging infrastructure such as subsea data centres, underwater habitats and deep-sea observatories — uses of the seabed that barely existed a decade ago but now generate real design questions.

Modelling, Data and Lifecycle Thinking

The journal's final two topic areas are methodological. Advanced modelling and data-driven methods covers high-fidelity simulation of coupled soil–fluid–structure interaction, and the application of artificial intelligence, digital twins and data analytics in marine geotechnical engineering. Lifecycle, risk and resilience covers reliability-based design, innovative construction and monitoring, and sustainable lifecycle strategies, including decommissioning, for all types of coastal and offshore projects. Together they frame the journal's modern stance: marine geotechnics is no longer only a matter of factors of safety applied to survey data, but of instrumented structures, continuously updated models, and whole-life thinking from installation to removal.

Editors and Editorial Board

Marine Geotechnics is led by two Editors-in-Chief: Yang-Ping Yao of Beihang University in Beijing, and Zhen-Yu Yin of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Its editors are Andrea Diambra of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, Fuping Gao of Tsinghua University, Dechun Lu of Xiamen University and Yinghui Tian of the University of Melbourne in Australia. The managing editors are Yin-Fu Jin of Shenzhen University and Haoyuan Liu of Beihang University. The editorial board of around forty members is strongly international, including Fraser Bransby and Yuxia Hu of the University of Western Australia, Ha Bui of Monash University, Jinhyun Choo of Seoul National University, Sheng Dai of Georgia Institute of Technology, Yosuke Higo of Kyoto University, Jie Han of the University of Kansas, Dongfang Liang of the University of Cambridge, Daniel Dias of Grenoble Alpes University, Panagiotis Kotronis of École Centrale de Nantes, Stefano Utili of Newcastle University, Richard Wan of the University of Calgary, Wei Wu of BOKU University in Austria and Zefeng Zhou of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, alongside many members from Chinese institutions including Ocean University of China, Zhejiang University, Tongji University, Tianjin University and Dalian University of Technology.

Article Types and Double-Anonymized Review

The journal publishes four kinds of content: full-length articles, reviews, case histories — a format well suited to a field that learns from documented project experience — and editorials. Its peer review is double anonymized, a point of difference from the single-anonymized model used by many sister KeAi journals: neither authors nor reviewers know the other's identity. Submissions are first assessed by the editors for suitability; suitable papers are typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers, and the editors' decision is final. Editors are excluded from decisions on their own work, that of family or colleagues, or work in which they have an interest, and conflicted special-issue submissions are reassigned within the board. Manuscripts are screened automatically with iThenticate's CrossCheck for plagiarism and overlapping text, and ORCiD identifiers are supported.

Open Access Model

Marine Geotechnics is a fully open-access journal: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. As the guide for authors explains, that openness is funded by an article publishing charge (APC) paid by authors or on their behalf by their research funder or institution, with the detailed charge information given on the journal's open-access page. Reuse is defined by Creative Commons licences: CC BY allows distribution, adaptation and commercial reuse with appropriate credit and a link to the licence, while CC BY-NC-ND allows non-commercial distribution of the unmodified article; authors needing to satisfy a funder's policy can apply for a CC BY licence after acceptance. Authors retain scholarly usage rights, while KeAi Communications is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights.

Readership and Significance

The journal's readership spans geotechnical engineers designing offshore foundations, researchers modelling seabed soils, offshore energy developers, pipeline and cable engineers, coastal engineers, and specialists in marine hazards and deep-sea resources. Its significance lies in consolidation: research on seabed soil mechanics has historically been scattered across general geotechnical, ocean engineering and energy journals, and Marine Geotechnics offers it a single, openly accessible forum edited by senior figures from Beihang University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University with a board spanning Australia, Europe, North America and East Asia. For WorldNM readers, Marine Geotechnics is catalogued as a scholarly magazine published in Beijing, China, with its official home on the KeAi Publishing website, where its aims, topic list, editorial board and guide for authors are maintained.