About Extreme Environments and Engineering

Extreme Environments and Engineering

Extreme Environments and Engineering is an English-language, open-access journal published by KeAi Communications in Beijing, China, with publishing services provided by Elsevier. The journal is abbreviated EEE. It addresses the scientific and engineering challenges posed by extreme environments: the places and conditions in which conventional design assumptions break down. Its scope names cryospheric regions, extreme precipitation, severe heat and drought, aggressive corrosion, intense radiation, volcanic terrains, and deep-earth and deep-sea conditions. Across those settings, the journal organises its coverage into five areas: infrastructure engineering in extreme environments; hazard mechanisms and protective engineering; geotechnical physics and mechanics; novel materials and technologies; and ecosystem responses and environmental impacts.

The journal's premise is that engineering is increasingly practised at the margins of the habitable and the conventionally buildable. Infrastructure now extends into polar and high-altitude cold regions, into deep mines and deep-sea installations, and into terrain exposed to intensifying precipitation, heat and drought. At the same time, materials and structures in ordinary latitudes face aggressive corrosion and radiation environments in industrial and energy settings. Extreme Environments and Engineering provides a single peer-reviewed venue in which research on those dispersed settings can be read together, because the underlying questions — how hazards arise, how ground and materials behave, how structures can be protected, and how ecosystems respond — recur across all of them.

Publisher and publishing model

The journal is published through KeAi Communications, the Beijing-based open-access publisher co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier. KeAi was repurposed as an open-access journal publishing service provider in 2013 and has since developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across the scientific disciplines, leveraging its parent companies' capabilities, including ScienceDirect hosting, Editorial Manager submission handling, data analytics and production. Extreme Environments and Engineering is listed in KeAi's journals directory among the publisher's English-language open-access titles. As an open-access journal, its articles are published free for everyone to read and download, under the open-access arrangements set out in the journal's own author guidance on the KeAi website.

That publishing context matters for a journal of this kind. Research on extreme environments is produced by geographically scattered communities — cold-regions engineers, deep-sea researchers, volcanologists, corrosion scientists, geotechnical specialists — many of them working at field stations, institutes and agencies rather than in large university library systems. Immediate open access on a major hosting platform makes the journal's content available to that whole readership without subscription barriers, and gives authors in each specialism exposure to the adjacent specialisms the journal deliberately brings together.

The environments in scope

The journal's scope is defined first by its environments. Cryospheric regions — the parts of the Earth system where water is frozen, including polar regions, glaciers and permafrost terrain — pose foundational engineering problems: ground that changes mechanical behaviour as it thaws, ice loads on structures, and construction and maintenance in extreme cold. Extreme precipitation, and the flooding and slope instability it triggers, forms a second setting, increasingly relevant as intense rainfall events test drainage, embankments, slopes and foundations designed for historical conditions. Severe heat and drought form a third: high temperatures stress materials, structures and water systems, while drought alters ground behaviour and ecosystem stability.

Aggressive corrosion and intense radiation define environments that are chemical and physical rather than climatic. Corrosion in marine, industrial and underground settings is a principal cause of infrastructure degradation and failure, and understanding its mechanisms in aggressive conditions is a precondition for durable design. Intense radiation environments — in nuclear facilities, in space-adjacent applications and in deep geological settings — impose their own material and shielding challenges. Volcanic terrains add the hazards of eruptions, ash, lava and unstable volcanic ground. Deep-earth and deep-sea conditions complete the list: the high pressures, high temperatures, darkness and remoteness encountered in deep mining, tunnelling, geothermal development and subsea engineering, where access for inspection and repair is limited and the cost of failure is high. A journal that treats all of these as one subject asserts that methods and findings transfer between them — that, for example, protective engineering developed for permafrost can inform practice in other thermally extreme settings.

Infrastructure engineering in extreme environments

The first of the journal's five areas is infrastructure engineering in extreme environments: the design, construction, operation and maintenance of built infrastructure where conditions are extreme. This covers the civil and structural engineering of facilities in cold regions, in deep locations, on coasts and slopes exposed to severe weather, and in other settings named in the scope. Research in this area addresses how infrastructure can be made to perform reliably where temperature ranges, ground instability, water, ice, corrosion or pressure exceed the envelopes assumed by ordinary codes and practice.

Infrastructure in such settings has a distinctive lifecycle profile. Construction windows may be short and logistics difficult; monitoring must often be remote; maintenance access may be seasonal or expensive; and design life must be achieved under degradation processes that are faster or less predictable than in temperate, accessible locations. By naming infrastructure engineering as its first area, the journal signals that complete engineering studies — design cases, construction methods, in-service performance and lessons from practice — are core content, alongside the underlying science in its other areas.

Hazard mechanisms and protective engineering

The second area couples hazard mechanisms with protective engineering: understanding how damaging processes in extreme environments work, and engineering the means to protect people, structures and systems from them. The mechanism side covers the physical and chemical processes by which extreme conditions cause harm — how thaw weakens frozen ground, how intense precipitation initiates landslides and floods, how corrosion penetrates and weakens materials, how volcanic and deep-earth processes threaten workings and structures. The protective side covers the engineering responses: barriers, reinforcements, drainage, shielding, monitoring-and-warning arrangements and design measures that reduce exposure or consequence.

Pairing the two in one area reflects a methodological position. Protective engineering that is not grounded in mechanism risks treating symptoms; mechanism research that never reaches protection risks irrelevance to practice. The journal's structure invites papers at both ends of that chain and, especially, papers that connect them — studies in which a clarified mechanism directly informs a protective design, a monitoring threshold or a maintenance strategy for infrastructure in an extreme setting.

Geotechnical physics and mechanics

The third area, geotechnical physics and mechanics, provides the journal's theoretical foundation in the behaviour of ground. Much engineering in extreme environments is, at root, geotechnical: foundations on permafrost, tunnels and caverns at depth, slopes under extreme rainfall, subsea sediments bearing structures and pipelines, and volcanic or otherwise unstable terrain. The physics and mechanics of soils and rocks under extreme temperatures, pressures, water contents and stress states determine what can be built and how it will behave over time.

Research in this area characteristically combines laboratory testing under simulated extreme conditions, field observation and instrumentation, and theoretical and numerical modelling. It is also the area in which the journal's environments most clearly intersect: the mechanics of frozen ground, of deep rock under high stress and temperature, and of saturated slopes under intense precipitation are different problems, but they share constitutive questions about how geomaterials deform, fail and evolve. Publishing them together allows methodological advances in one setting to be evaluated for the others.

Novel materials and technologies

The fourth area covers novel materials and technologies developed for, or tested under, extreme conditions. Materials research in this context addresses performance where standard materials degrade: resistance to aggressive corrosion, stability under intense radiation, strength and durability through freeze–thaw and extreme heat, and behaviour under the pressures of deep-earth and deep-sea deployment. Technologies research addresses the instruments, construction methods, monitoring systems and operational techniques that make work in such environments possible at all.

This area gives the journal its forward-looking engineering edge. Progress in extreme-environment engineering frequently arrives as a material or a technique — a coating, a composite, a sensor system, a construction method — proven in one extreme setting and then transferable to others. By scoping novel materials and technologies as a distinct area alongside infrastructure and geotechnics, the journal ensures that such contributions have a natural home even when they are not yet embedded in a complete infrastructure case study.

Ecosystem responses and environmental impacts

The fifth area, ecosystem responses and environmental impacts, extends the journal beyond structures and materials to the living systems that extreme environments contain and that engineering activity affects. Cryospheric, volcanic, deep-sea and arid ecosystems are often fragile and slow to recover; they also respond sensitively to the same extreme processes the journal studies — thaw, drought, heat, eruption and disturbance. Research in this area examines how ecosystems respond to extreme conditions and change, and what environmental impacts engineering works and hazard events have upon them.

Including this area changes the character of the journal in an important way. Engineering in extreme environments is not only a question of whether a structure survives; it is also a question of what construction, operation and failure do to environments that may be scientifically unique and ecologically vulnerable. A combined readership of engineers and environmental researchers, sharing one journal, is better placed to weigh both questions together — and to design infrastructure whose protective engineering protects ecosystems as well as assets.

Readership and place in the field

The journal's readership spans civil, geotechnical and protective engineering; materials science; cold-regions and polar research; deep-sea and deep-earth engineering communities; volcanology and natural-hazards research; and environmental science. Few existing journals draw exactly this circle: hazards journals, geotechnical journals, cold-regions journals and environmental journals each cover a segment of it. Extreme Environments and Engineering is scoped for the whole, on the argument that the defining feature of its subject is not a discipline or a single region but extremity itself — conditions under which ordinary engineering and environmental assumptions cease to hold.

For authors, the journal offers a venue in which a study of permafrost foundations, a corrosion-protection method, a deep-sea material test and an ecosystem response assessment can each be evaluated by reviewers who understand extreme conditions as a shared research problem. For readers in China — a country whose infrastructure programme spans permafrost plateaus, deep mines, major river systems under extreme precipitation, deserts under severe heat and drought, and an expanding deep-sea capability — as well as for the international community working in the same settings, the journal provides a Beijing-published, English-language, open-access record of that work.

Access and identification

The journal is listed in the KeAi Publishing journals directory, and its official website, as recorded for this directory, is its KeAi journal page for Extreme Environments and Engineering, where its scope, editorial information and author guidance are maintained. The journal is abbreviated EEE in the publisher's materials. Articles are published open access, free to read and download. Prospective authors should consult the journal's KeAi pages for current information on article types, peer-review arrangements and any article publishing charge or waiver provisions before submitting.