The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity visited two active wind-blown sand dunes within Gale crater, Mars, which provided the first ground-based opportunity to compare Martian and terrestrial eolian dune sedimentary processes and study a modern analog for the Martian eolian rock record. Orbital and rover images of these dunes reveal terrestrial-like and uniquely Martian processes. The prese...

rock chutes are natural river training structures and are efficient energy dissipaters too. from the hydraulic and environmental point of view, rock chutes have become important structures in the natural river morphology. a physical study was conducted and flow properties were measured over rough bed materials of a rock chute, which was assembled at the pitlab center of the university of pisa, ...

Toppling failure is one of the most common modes of failure of rock slopes in layered rock strata. Flexural toppling is one of the well-known modes of the failure. This type of failure occurs due to bending stress. In this article, a brief yet comprehensive review of toppling failure is presented. Firstly, the conditions and general mechanism of the failure are described. Then, experimental, th...

Neuro-fuzzy inference systems have been used in many areas in civil engineering applications. A stability assessment model for epimetamorphic rock slopes has been developed by using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) for its capacity of dynamic nonlinear analyses. In the present study the inference system is employed to predict the stability of the slope by choosing bulk density γ, t...

Rockfalls are dominant in the rock slopes and rock ridge morphodynamics in high mountain areas and endanger people who pass along or stay there, as well as infrastructure that host them (cable cars, refuges). Risks are probably greater now because of fast permafrost degradation and regression of surface ice, two consequences of the atmospheric warming of the last decades. These two commonly ass...

This paper aimed to review and compare the conventional and advanced numerical techniques used for stability analysis of rock slopes. Two important methods of probabilistic limit equilibrium analysis and distinct element method are used to check the stability of northern abutment rock slope of Gotvand dam (iran) and the advantages and disadvantages of each method is discussed. The results of th...

This research focuses on the identification and description of various features of pseudokarst in different parts of Alvand granitic batholith, Hamedan, west of Iran. In the literature, karst features have been presented as specific types of terrain or landscapes with particular characteristics suites of well-known surface and subsurface dissolutional forms. Whereas, pseudokarst refers to non-d...