Related papers: Modeling ice cliff stability using a new Mohr-Coul…
There is a need for computational models capable of predicting meltwater-assisted crevasse growth in glacial ice. Mass loss from glaciers and ice sheets is the largest contributor to sea-level rise and iceberg calving due to hydrofracture…
Iceberg calving accounts for around half of the ice lost annually from Antarctica, but realistic representation of fracture and calving in large-scale ice sheet models remains a major unsolved problem in glaciology. We present a new…
Slope stability description through mechanical laws has important implication for Earth morphology understanding and risk assessment. Previous researches have showed that shear, tensile, and hybrid fractures can be observed experimentally…
While it has been shown repeatedly that ocean conditions exhibit an important control on the behaviour of grounded tidewater glaciers, modelling studies have focused largely on the effects of basal and surface melting. Here, a…
The Mohr-Coulomb criterion is widely used in geosciences to relate the state of stress at failure to the observed orientation of the resulting faults. This relation is based on the assumption that the fault occurs along a plane that…
An ice shelf is a floating extension of a land-based ice sheet into the ocean. It plays a crucial role in slowing down the flow of land ice into the sea, thus stabilizing the ice sheet. However, this stabilizing effect can be weakened by…
We study at the laboratory scale the rupture of thin floating sheets made of a brittle material under a wave-induced mechanical forcing. We show that the rupture occurs where the curvature is maximum and the break-up threshold strongly…
Contacts at the Coulomb threshold are unstable to tangential perturbations and thus contribute to failure at the microscopic level. How is such a local property related to global failure, beyond the effective picture given by a Mohr-Coulomb…
Hydraulic fracturing increases reservoir permeability by opening fractures and triggering slip on natural fractures and faults. While seismic slip of small faults or fault patches is detectable as microseismic events, the role of aseismic…
Geologic shear fractures such as faults and slip surfaces involve marked friction along the discontinuities as they are subjected to significant confining pressures. This friction plays a critical role in the growth of these shear…
We analyse the statistical pattern of seismicity before a 1-2 103 m3 chalk cliff collapse on the Normandie ocean shore, Western France. We show that a power law acceleration of seismicity rate and energy in both 40 Hz-1.5 kHz and 2 Hz-10kHz…
This paper presents a framework for modeling failure in quasi-brittle geomaterials under different loading conditions. A micromechanics-based model is proposed in which the field variables are linked to physical mechanisms at the microcrack…
Dynamically significant magnetic fields are routinely observed in molecular clouds, with mass-to-flux ratio lambda = (2 pi sqrt{G}) (Sigma/B) ~ 1 (here Sigma is the total column density and B is the field strength). It is widely believed…
Flexure of Antarctic ice shelves under excitation from long ocean waves induces mechanical ice shelf stresses that amplify fractures and, hence, contribute to calving events. Here, a solution method is developed for a hydroelastic…
A continuum model of fracture that describes, in principle, the propagation and interaction of arbitrary distributions of cracks and voids with evolving topology without a fracture criterion is developed. It involves a 'law of motion' for…
Mechanical and sliding instabilities are the two processes which may lead to breaking off events of large ice masses. Mechanical instabilities mainly affect unbalanced cold hanging glaciers. For the latter case, a prediction could be…
The stability of dry-snow avalanches is strongly dependent on the interaction between the snow slab above a weak-layer and, as presented in this work, the skier induced load. This induced load causes an additional stress field on the slab…
Bio-chemical reactions enable the production of biomimetic materials such as sandstones. In the present study, microbiologically-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) is used to manufacture laboratory-scale specimens for fracture…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
We show that the equilibrium interfaces in the disordered phase have critical percolation fractal dimension over a wide range of length scales. We confirm that the system falls out of equilibrium at a temperature that depends on the cooling…