on the downstream side of sheet piling and beneath the toe of a dam or levee. Erosion of the soil, known as "soil piping", can lead to failure of the structure and to sinkhole formation. Seeping water removes soil, starting from the exit point of the seepage, and erosion advances upgradient. The term "sand boil" is used to describe the appearance of the discharging end of an active soil pipe. Seepage pressures Seepage in an upward direction reduces the effective stress within the soil. When the water pressure at a point in the soil is equal to the total vertical stress at that point, the effective stress is zero and the soil has no frictional resistance to deformation. For a surface layer, the vertical effective stress becomes zero within the layer when the upward hydraulic gradient is equal to the critical gradient. At zero effective stress soil has very little strength and layers of relatively impermeable soil may heave up due to the underlying water pressures. The loss in strength due to upward seepage is a common contributor to levee failures. The condition of zero effective stress associated with upward seepage is also called liquefaction, quicksand, or a boiling condition. Quicksand was so named because the soil particles move around and appear to be 'alive' (the biblical meaning of 'quick' – as opposed to 'dead'). (Note that it is not possible to be 'sucked down' into quicksand. On the contrary, you would float with about half your body out of the water.) Effective stress and capillarity: hydrostatic conditions To understand the mechanics of soils it is necessary to understand how normal stresses and shear stresses are shared by the different phases. Neither gas nor liquid provide significant resistance to shear stress. The shear resistance of soil is provided by friction and interlocking of the particles. The friction depends on the intergranular contact stresses between solid particles. The normal stresses, on the other hand, are shared by the fluid and the particles. Although the pore air is relatively compressible, and hence takes little normal stress in most geotechnical problems, liquid water is relatively incompressible and if the voids are saturated with water, the pore water must be squeezed out in order to pack the particles closer together. The principle of effective stress, introduced by Karl Terzaghi, states that the effective stress σ''' (i.e., the average intergranular stress between solid particles) may