Huge landslides, mobilizing hundreds to thousands of km(3) of sediment and rock are ubiquitous in submarine settings ranging from the steepest volcanic island slopes to the gentlest muddy slopes of submarine deltas. Here, we summarize current knowledge of such landslides and the problems of assessing their hazard potential. The major hazards related to submarine landslides include destruction o...

One of the most important instabilities of rock slopes is toppling failure. Among the types of toppling failure, block-flexural failures are more common instability which occurs in nature. In this failure, some rock blocks break because of tensile stresses, and some overturn under their weights, and next to all of them topple together. Physical and theoretical modeling of this failure is studie...

The paper discusses operations aimed at creating a safer natural or man made rock slope by artificially inducing the displacement of unstable elements by blasting. A detailed analysis of the problems with the use of explosives present when conducting these activities is carried out focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of this technology. The results of two examples of demolition of inst...

In the mid‐1980s, advances in understanding the mechanics of the fold‐and‐thrust belts that flank many collisional mountain ranges set the stage for a fundamental change in our appreciation of the role of erosion in the tectonic evolution of mountain ranges. A combination of sandbox experiments, analytical treatments of stress state and field observations showed that fold‐and‐thrust belts form ...

Due to existence of uncertainties in input geometrical properties of fractures, there is not any unique solution for assessing the stability of slopes in jointed rock masses. Therefore, the necessity of applying probabilistic analysis in these cases is inevitable. In this study a probabilistic analysis procedure together with relevant algorithms are developed using Discrete Fracture Network-Dis...

We investigate slope distributions in the northern hemisphere of Mars from topographic profiles collected by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. Analysis of the region from about 12øS to 82øN, over diverse geologic units, indicates that the range of regional-scale slopes is small, generally < 3 ø. Surface smoothness is most distinctive in the vast northern hemisphere plains, where slopes are typi...

Abstract. Over the last 2 decades, permafrost degradation has been observed to be a major driver of enhanced rock slope instability and associated hazards in high mountains. While thermal regime mountains addressed several modelling approaches, no mechanical models that thoroughly explain destabilisation controls degrading have developed. Meanwhile, recent laboratory studies shown affects both,...

The intersection lines between discontinuity surfaces and their intersection points on the visible surfaces of any engineering structure may be the instability indicators. This paper describes a new approach to modelling the intersecting lines and points that would provide the first evaluation of any instability in an engineering structure characterized by the failure modes. In this work, the i...