title: Quick clay and landslides of clayey soils.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65, 1018XE Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Asmae
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Khaldoun
authors.forename: Peder
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Moller
authors.forename: Abdoulaye
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fall
authors.forename: Gerard
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Wegdam
authors.forename: Bert
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: De Leeuw
authors.forename: Yves
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Méheust
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Otto Fossum
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bonn