**1. Introduction**

The ocean is the cradle of life and is rich in natural resources. With the worldwide boom in exploration and application of ocean resources, a dramatic increase in coastal and offshore engineering construction has been observed in the last few decades. The rapid development of human economic activities and changing global climate has had significant impacts on the marine environment, resulting in increased impact from natural disasters. Under this circumstance, there is an urgent need for platform for scientists and engineers to share their state-of-art research outcomes in the field of Marine Engineering Geology.

In order to provide a platform for marine engineering geological researchers and enhance their cohesion, the Commission No. 34—Marine Engineering Geology (C34) was established under the support of the International Association for Engineering Geology and the Environment (IAEG) in Banff, Canada in 2012. In 2016, the First International Symposium on Marine Engineering Geology (ISMEG 2016) was successfully held in Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China.

During the 18–20 October 2019, the 2nd International Symposium on Marine Engineering Geology (ISMEG 2019) was held in Dalian, China. The second international symposium was sponsored by IAEG-C34, hosted by State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering (Dalian University of Technology), and co-hosted by the Department of Earth Science, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Marine Environment and Geological Engineering (Ocean University of China) and several other organizations. Nearly 300 representatives from over 70 international research institutions, universities, and businesses attended the symposium, discussed recent advances, shared their knowledge, and identified future research directions in the field of marine engineering geology. The theme of this symposium is "Exploration of Marine Resources and Marine Engineering Geology", covering topics including engineering properties of marine soils, marine geological hazards and preventions, in situ exploration, monitoring, and physical modeling, hydrodynamics and environmental interaction, exploration of gas hydrate, offshore foundations, and pipe–soil–fluid interaction.

The objective of this Special Issue is to collect high-quality papers from ISMEG 2019 participants and provide a timely overview of recent advances and case studies in this field. The issue collected 14 papers that cover different aspects of marine engineering geology and geotechnics using different approaches. Some of them used numerical simulations [1–5], some conducted laboratory experiments [6–10], and others acquired and analyzed field or laboratory tests to establish a theoretical modeling framework for predicting marine sediment properties and the potential hazards [11–14]. Moreover, with a timely and well-organized publication, it is believed that the state-of-the-art data, analyses, and methodologies presented

**Citation:** Liu, X.; Yang, Q.; Wang, Y.; Jeng, D.-S.; Sturm, H. New Advances in Marine Engineering Geology. *J. Mar. Sci. Eng.* **2021**, *9*, 66. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse 9010066

Received: 2 December 2020 Accepted: 7 January 2021 Published: 11 January 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

in this Special Issue could be of great interest to all readers of Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.

The core aspects of each paper in the special issue are synthesized in the following section.
