Global Journal of Human-Social Science, B: Geography, Environmental Science and Disaster Management, Volume 22 Issue 3

Figure 1: Location of the soils in the Metropolitan Region of Recife - Pernambuco, Brazil The characteristic climate of the region is marked by large volumes of rainfall (1,500 to 2,000 mm per year) and high temperatures (> 20ºC), according to the Agência Pernambucana de Água e Clima (APAC), a typical condition of tropical environments according to CHESWORTH et al., (2008). Most of the selected materials are from the Barreiras Geological Formation which is formed by unconsolidated sediments with diversified particle size, observing the predominance of clay and sandy clay sediments and, less frequently, sandy, and may also present ferruginous concretions and pebbles (CPRM, 2014 and Coutinho et al., 2019). In terms of pedology, the predominant soils are yellow acrisols and yellow latosols (in the Brazilian classification), which in the international soil classification system of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) can comprehend the classes of ferralsols and acrisols. They are soils that have suffered a lot from weathering processes and often present the phenomenon of natural cohesion/cementation, which is a strong pedogenetic hardening of the soil when it reaches the dry state (reversible in the wet state) due to the high concentrations of Fe hydroxides and Al oxides (CPRM, 2014; Guimarães, Silva Filho and Castro, 2021; Sousa et al., 2021; Coutinho and Sousa, 2021), as was clearly identified in the soils studied in this article (examples in Figure 2). Figure 2: Examples of the natural cementation of the thin tropical soils of this research (a) 12SU-LG’ (b) 13IP-LA’ Volume XXII Issue III Version I 12 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals B Clustering of Fine-Grained Tropical Soils using Data Science Tools Applied to their Geotechnical Properties