Steep slopes consisting of disturbed soil are very often found in construction, landfill, and surface mining situations. Although legislation and economics dictate that vegetative cover be established on these slopes as rapidly as possible, the occurrence of large rainfall events during critical periods of vegetation establishment can frequently cause extensive soil loss. Sediment generated fro...

Good quality terrain models are becoming more and more important, as applications such as runoff modelling are being developed that demand better surface orientation information than is available from traditional interpolation techniques. A consequence is that poor-quality elevation grids must be massaged before they provide useable runoff models. Rather than using direct data acquisition, this...

Rock slope instabilities are discussed in the context of decision making for risk assessment and management. Hence, the state of the slope and possible failure mechanism need to be defined first. This is done with geometrical and mechanical models for which recent developments are presented. This leads with appropriate consideration of uncertainties to risk determination and to the description ...

The response of submerged slopes on the continental shelf to seismic or storm loading has become an important element in the risk assessment for offshore structures and “local” tsunami hazards worldwide. The geological profile of these slopes typically includes normally consolidated to lightly overconsolidated soft cohesive soils with layer thickness ranging from a few meters to hundreds of met...

[1] Accumulations of rocky debris at the base of bedrock escarpments on Mars have mean inclinations of 20 , well below the angle of repose ( 35 ). These inclinations decrease with increasing latitude, suggesting a climatic influence. We present evidence that these low inclinations are the result of gravitational creep driven by repeated deposition and sublimation of ground ice. We estimate the ...

Infants acquire independent mobility amidst a flux of body growth. Changes in body dimensions and variations in the ground change the physical constraints on keeping balance. The study examined whether toddlers can adapt to changes in their body dimensions and variations in the terrain by loading them with lead weights and observing how they navigated safe and risky slopes. Experiment 1 verifie...

Configuration of locomotion for planetary rovers is motivated by increased interest in exploring lunar polar craters. Current rover designs cannot achieve the ascent or descent required by steep, unconsolidated lunar slopes. New designs must provide locomotive capability for steep climbing, techniques for controlling slip, and safely navigating down and along steep slopes. We propose a locomoti...

Given a knot K in a 3-manifold M , we use N(K) to denote a regular neighborhood of K. Suppose γ is a slope (i.e an isotopy class of essential simple closed curves) on ∂N(K). The surgered manifold along γ is denoted by (H,K; γ), which by definition is the manifold obtained by gluing a solid torus to H − IntN(K) so that γ bounds a meridianal disk. We say that M is ∂-reducible if ∂M is compressibl...