The purpose of this paper is to encourage the use of the seismic cone penetrometer (SCPTU) in soil characterisation studies. There has been an increase in use of shear wave velocity (V s ) data in geotech nical engineering. This has been prompted by improvements in measurement and analytical systems. A significant advantage, as is confirmed here, is that V s can be measured easily and repeatedly by several different techniques in the sensitive marine clays under consideration here. Here the focus is on the derivation of preconsolidation stress (p c ') from V s . A rational method of determining a V s /p c ' relationship is outlined with resorting to empirical data analysis. The proposed relationship is shown to work well for Canadian sensi tive clay data as has been shown previously for Norwegian and Swedish clays

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