No one can tell you the best topic in any field. This is a personal decision. By the time you are ready for a PhD, you should be adept at choosing a creative topic without any help. You can choose a few and ask an expert in the field what they think but part of PhD work is PROVING you have the intellectual training and the creativity to produce new knowledge. The more creative and individualized the better. Period.
In general, no student should ask for topic help after freshman year and not even then really.
I think the answer is time-dependent and it can differ from place to place as well as your area of interest so that you have to go into detail and dig out what is the current hot issue worldwide.
I agree with Al Mouayed Bellah Nafeh, specialy if you aim at sensitive geotechnical structures like tailing dams in a mining context.
It is impossible to say which is the best topic, it depends on your expectations, skills, and possibilities. Some nice topics, from my point of view, includes soil dynamics, tunnels behavior, constitutive modeling in Geomechanics and shear strength of landfills, but there is a lot of more topics.
(1) Vulnerability Mapping with field based input esp estimation and analysis of geotechnical properties of soil/ debris; (2) Role of TBM in Tunnel Excavation; (3) Support design for underground structures viz. caverns, u/g power house etc.; (4) Coastal Geotechniques etc.
Crack, crunch, scrape, swoosh! Seriously - progressive failure of rock slopes - involving (possibly) all four components of strength (and weakness). We have been waiting 50, 100 or more years. So much of what we have done has ignored/failed to match the reality. Start with physical models of partly fractured rock simulants. Progress to modelling the components. Specifically do not use GSI.
What I think is more important is that the engineers seem do not interested in numerical simulations. They are waiting for new more operability and simplification assessment methods, e.g., a new method for assessing the occurrence location, time, scale of slope failure with FOS.
When I was mining underground the problem of rock bursts could not be overcome. Many specialists visited and introduced new methods, but still rock bursts were still happening, some with fatal results. It would be nice to have some innovative new research done on this subject with some solutions.
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