Atterberg Limits are the water contents which define transitions between the solid, plastic, and liquid states of a given soil material. The tests are restricted to cohesive soils with appreciable silt or clay fraction, and cannot be conducted readily on either sands or silts with a high sand fraction. Detailed mineralogical studies of cohesive soils have shown that Atterberg Limits are strongly related to both clay content and clay mineral species, and hence ultimately to the climatic and geologic conditions prevailing in the environment of deposition and during the post-depositional weathering cycle.
The modern test procedures for Atterberg Limits were formalized by engineers in the first half of the 20th century, and are described in most modern soil mechanics texts (Craig, 1997). Although the tests yield simple index numbers of soil behavior at various water contents, an important focus of modern soils engineering research has been to establish correlations between Atterberg...
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© 1978 Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.
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Bovis, M.J. (1978). Atterberg limits. In: Sedimentology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31079-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31079-7_10
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