Slope failures in weakly cemented vertical cliffs in Corfu Greece

Photos taken in August 2002

These photos were taken from The North-West coastline of the Greek
Island of Corfu. This side of the island is largely characterized by the
vertical slopes as shown in the above Figure. One can easily observe
the horizontal layering of the sedimentary material. This material
consists of weakly cemented, silt, clay and sand in layers.

While travelling along the coastline one can see many failures such as
those shown in the Figure above, next to the sea but also in another
vertical slope well above the sea level. These failures are largely shallow
vertical plane failures caused by stress release fracturing and cantilever
block falls.

Interesting papers on the failure mechanism of similar slopes along the
coast of Northern California are published by Sitar (1990) and J.
Hampton (2002).

This topic becomes especially important if there are structures at the top
of the cliff. Hampton (2002) has an interesting photo of such failure at
North Esplanade beach in Pacifica, CA. A similar event of failure can be
seen here!

References:

Sitar, N. (1990), Seismic Response of steep slopes in weakly
cemented sands and gravels, Proceedings of the H.B. Seed
Memorial Symposium, Bitech Publishers, Vancouver, BC, pp.67-82.
Hampton, A. (2002), Gravitational failure of sea cliffs in weakly
lithified sediment, Environmental & Engineering Geoscience, vlo.
VIII, No.3, August 2002, pp.175-191.

Slope Failures in weakly cemented vertical cliffs in Corfu, Greece

available by the geoengineer website

Copyrights & Permissions

G eoengineer.org is part of TheCivilEngineer website

Want to be informed of
updates for FREE?

HAVE YOUR
BANNER HERE!

Click for more