Quick clay and landslides of clayey soils.
We study the rheology of quick clay, an unstable soil responsible for many landslides. We show that above a critical stress the material starts flowing abruptly with a very large viscosity decrease caused by the flow. This leads to avalanche behavior that accounts for the instability of quick clay soils. Reproducing landslides on a small scale in the laboratory shows that an additional factor that determines the violence of the slides is the inhomogeneity of the flow. We propose a simple yield stress model capable of reproducing the laboratory landslide data, allowing us to relate landslides to the measured rheology.
Khaldoun
Asmae
A
van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65, 1018XE Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Moller
Peder
P
Fall
Abdoulaye
A
Wegdam
Gerard
G
De Leeuw
Bert
B
Méheust
Yves
Y
Otto Fossum
Jon
J
Bonn
Daniel
D