Introduction During the last decade, two major research programs with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (McGee et al., 1995) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Caulfield and Filkins, 1996, 1999) were carried out to develop analytical techniques for the remote classification of geotechnical parameters in marine near-surface subbottom structures with shallow seismic data. This effort was built on earlier bottom classification work by Breslau (1965), Hamilton (1970), and Shumway (1960), coupled with the theoretical work of Biot (1956), Sheriff (1975), and Panda et al. (1994).