Introduction: Mars exhibits a wide variety of landforms that are indicative of ductile flow, ranging from the viscous creep of ice-rich permafrost [1] to the glaciation of thick Martian ice sheets [2] to the surface mobility of thin debris flows [3]. All of these flow features probably contain significant amounts of dust, which for example will likely be present throughout the impact-disrupted ...

Soil creep is the most widespread and perhaps the least understood process of erosion on soil-mantled hillslopes. Soil is slowly ‘‘stirred’’ by burrowing creatures, and particles are displaced in wetting-drying cycles. These actions can cause downslope creep by processes analogous to particle diffusion. Other possible transport mechanisms include shear and viscous-like creep, such that precise ...

Stress relaxation experiments are reported that culminate in energetic failure in rocks analogous to the loading cycle and subsequent localization or reactivation on brittle faults embedded in an elastic medium. Universally, rapid primary deformation arrests and transitions into a long secondary deformation phase that ultimately accelerates to catastrophic rupture. Primary deformation (u) confo...

The accelerated creep plays an important role in the disasters of soft-rock tunnels under high stress. However, most previous studies only involved attenuation and uniform creep. Large deformation soft rock occurred during tunneling process Qianzhou–Sanyangchuan Tunnel, Gusu Province, China. In paper, we developed nonlinear generalized Nishihara rheological model with non-stationary parameter (...

Several large strike slip faults in central and northern California accommodate plate motions through aseismic creep. Although there is no consensus regarding the underlying cause of creep, aqueous fluids mechanically weak, velocity-strengthening minerals appear to play a role. This study integrates field observations thermodynamic modeling examine possible relationships between occurrence serp...