Substrate cover by corals, soft corals, sand, bare rock and algae was determined by several means for seaward reef slopes of the Central Indian Ocean atolls of Peros Banhos and Salomon, Chagos Archipelago, and in the lagoon of the former. Cover of hard substrate by coelenterates averages 80 O/O between 3 and 42 m, and calcareous algae dominate above and below these depths. Alcyonarian corals co...

[1] New slope measurements from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), in conjunction with the Rock Mass Rating system (RMR), permit inversions of slope height and angle from wallrock and interior deposits within Valles Marineris troughs for strength and lithology. Wallrock (50 < RMR < 65) is stronger than interior deposits (30 < RMR < 55). These values are consistent with layered igneous roc...

Landslides along the Missouri and Kansas rivers will affect existing structures and potential development in the Kansas City metropolitan area. A pilot landslide-mapping project was conducted in the vicinity of Atchison, Kansas, to inventory existing landslides and determine the factors that caused them. Landslides are generally controlled by the slope morphology, geology, soils, and moisture c...

toppling failure is one of the most common modes of failure of rock slopes in layered rock strata. flexural toppling is one of the well-known modes of the failure. this type of failure occurs due to bending stress. in this article, a brief yet comprehensive review of toppling failure is presented. firstly, the conditions and general mechanism of the failure are described. then, experimental, th...

The stability of a potentially unstable rock mass strongly depends on the discontinuity pattern and the face topography. Basic geological analysis could provide useful structural information but suffers from the lack of information on discontinuities at depth. Of major importance is the persistence of discontinuities inside the mass. Several geophysical methods (seismic, electric and electromag...

In spring 2007, a large rock avalanche descended onto the Morsárjökull valley glacier in southeast Iceland, leaving one fifth of the glacier buried. The insulating effect of the deposit on the ice was quickly observed as a difference in the ablation between the exposed ice and that under the deposit. After three melt seasons, the ice surface under the deposit was 29 m above the surrounding glac...