The northern slopes of the Vipava Valley are defined by a thrust front Mesozoic carbonates over Tertiary flysch deposits. These characterized variety different surface forms, among which recent and fossil polygenetic landslides most prominent mass movements. We used height variability method as morphometric indicator, proved to be useful various methods for quantifying visualizing landslides. H...

During the winters of 1999 and 2000 large avalanches occurred in the ski resort of Las Leñas (Los Andes, Mendoza, Argentina). On 8 September 1999 an avalanche of new, dry snow ran over a path with a 1000 m vertical drop. On 30 June and on 1 July 2000 five avalanches of similar vertical drop, which start with new snow, entrained very wet snow during their descent, and evolved into dense snow ava...

The paper presents the results of an experimental and numerical analysis aimed to clarify some aspects regarding the impact of a granular flow on structures. The experimental set-up comprises a flume equipped with a system of differently sized model obstacles, which are placed along the run-out trajectory to measure the impact force. The soil used for the small-scale model is a mono-granular me...

Complex systems, when poised near a critical point of a phase transition between order and disorder, exhibit a dynamics comprising a scale-free mixture of order and disorder which is universal, i.e. system-independent (1-5). It allows systems at criticality to adapt swiftly to environmental changes (i.e., high susceptibility) as well as to flexibly process and store information. These unique pr...

Neural avalanches are a prominent form of brain activity characterized by network-wide bursts whose statistics follow a power-law distribution with a slope near 3/2. Recent work suggests that avalanches of different durations can be rescaled and thus collapsed together. This collapse mirrors work in statistical physics where it is proposed to form a signature of systems evolving in a critical s...

The main problems of mechanics of snow avalanches are those of: (1) predicting avalanches, (2) avalanche motion, (3) the action of an avalanche upon obstacles, (4) the air wave, (5) the slow moving snow cover and its interaction with protective constructions and (6) the problem of artificial release of avalanches. This paper surveys the modern state of scientific knowledge about the nature of p...

We present the experimental and numerical studies of a two-dimensional sheared amorphous material composed of bidisperse photoelastic disks. We analyze the statistics of avalanches during shear including the local and global fluctuations in energy and changes in particle positions and orientations. We find scale-free distributions for these global and local avalanches denoted by power laws whos...

[1] Sandpile avalanches were used first to illustrate the concept of self-organized criticality (SOC). Snow avalanches consist of two types: (1) loose snow avalanches which release in cohesionless material at the top of the snowpack and (2) slab avalanches which release by propagation of shear fractures originating in a thin weak layer at depth in the snowpack. Loose snow avalanches are analogo...

Spontaneous fluctuations in neuronal activity emerge at many spatial and temporal scales in cortex. Population measures found these fluctuations to organize as scale-invariant neuronal avalanches, suggesting cortical dynamics to be critical. Macroscopic dynamics, though, depend on physiological states and are ambiguous as to their cellular composition, spatiotemporal origin, and contributions f...