Engineering of High-pressure Testing of Oceanic Sediments that Want to Explode

A Warren Distinguished Lecture 
with Sheng Dai

Geosystems Engineering
Georgia Tech

Abstract

"Fifty years from leaky valves to breakthroughs of frozen fuel in sediments – the engineering of high-pressure testing of oceanic sediments that want to explode"

Gas hydrate looks like ordinary ice, but it traps enormous volumes of methane within marine sediments and permafrost soils, then collapses within minutes of reaching the ground surface. Fifty years of pressure-coring innovation, from 1970s leaky valves to today's high-pressure characterization chambers, has given engineers a way to recover, transfer, and test the sediments containing methane hydrate without ever letting them depressurize. The resulting data now shapes energy, climate, and offshore landslide research worldwide.

Speaker

Sheng Dai, Ph.D., P.E., is an associate professor and group coordinator in Geosystems Engineering and holds the inaugural Georgia Mining Association Early Career Professor at Georgia Tech. He is also a faculty member in the Ocean Science and Engineering and with a courtesy appointment at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. His group addresses resilience, sustainability, and adaptability in energy and the natural environment through studying energy geotechnics and nature-inspired engineering. His research and teaching have been recognized with the USUCGER Early Career Researcher Award (2025) and the NSF CAREER Award (2020). He was inducted into the inaugural Research Leadership Academy (2025) and the Emerging Leaders Program (2024) at Georgia Tech. He chairs TC308 Energy Geotechnics for the ISSMGE, and is a co-founder of the Nexus Geostructural Research Institute (NGRI, 2026), an independent not-for-profit institute dedicated to advancing geostructural engineering to enhance the adaptability and resilience of underground civil and energy
infrastructure.