Many rock avalanches entrain and liquefy saturated soil from their paths. Evidence for this includes mud displaced from the margins of rock avalanche deposits, substrate material smeared along the base of deposits, extrusion of liquefied soil upward through the deposits, and increases of volume. A hypothesis first suggested in 1881 and since reinforced by several authors suggests that entrainment of substrate material increases mobility. Although the process has been discussed in the literature for more than 100 years, few detailed and quantitative descriptions exist. The main purpose of this paper is to describe two recent cases from British Columbia, Canada, where rockslides entrained substrate on a very large scale, influencing the character of the events. Estimated volume balance curves, based on detailed field mapping, are provided for both cases. Dynamic analyses are carried out using a numerical model and using the same set of rheological parameters. The mechanism of material entrainment and displacement is discussed. The data suggest that rapid rock failures entraining very large quantities of saturated substrate material represent a special type of landslide, transitional between rock avalanche and debris avalanche. Many rock avalanches can thus be seen as end members of a continuum of phenomena involving rock failure followed by interaction with saturated substrate.

Entrainment of debris in rock avalanches: An analysis of a long run-out mechanism

Geophysical mass flows—debris flows, avalanches, landslides—can contain O (10 6 –10 10 )m 3 or more of material, often a mixture of soil and rocks with a significant quantity of interstitial fluid. These flows can be tens of meters in depth and hundreds of meters in length. The range of scales and the rheology of this mixture presents significant modelling and computational challenges. This paper describes a depth-averaged ‘thin layer’ model of geophysical mass flows containing a mixture of solid material and fluid. The model is derived from a ‘two-phase’ or ‘two-fluid’ system of equations commonly used in engineering research. Phenomenological modelling and depth averaging combine to yield a tractable set of equations, a hyperbolic system that describes the motion of the two constituent phases. If the fluid inertia is small, a reduced model system that is easier to solve may be derived.

A two-fluid model for avalanche and debris flows

[1] This paper presents a new, generalized two-phase debris flow model that includes many essential physical phenomena. The model employs the Mohr-Coulomb plasticity for the solid stress, and the fluid stress is modeled as a solid-volume-fraction-gradient-enhanced non-Newtonian viscous stress. The generalized interfacial momentum transfer includes viscous drag, buoyancy, and virtual mass. A new, generalized drag force is proposed that covers both solid-like and fluid-like contributions, and can be applied to drag ranging from linear to quadratic. Strong coupling between the solid- and the fluid-momentum transfer leads to simultaneous deformation, mixing, and separation of the phases. Inclusion of the non-Newtonian viscous stresses is important in several aspects. The evolution, advection, and diffusion of the solid-volume fraction plays an important role. The model, which includes three innovative, fundamentally new, and dominant physical aspects (enhanced viscous stress, virtual mass, generalized drag) constitutes the most generalized two-phase flow model to date, and can reproduce results from most previous simple models that consider single- and two-phase avalanches and debris flows as special cases. Numerical results indicate that the model can adequately describe the complex dynamics of subaerial two-phase debris flows, particle-laden and dispersive flows, sediment transport, and submarine debris flows and associated phenomena.

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A general two-phase debris flow model

The transient surface flow occurring when a cylindrical pile of dry granular material is suddenly allowed to spread on a horizontal plane is investigated experimentally as a function of the released mass M, the initial aspect ratio a of the granular cylinder pile, the properties of the underlying substrate (smooth or rough, rigid or erodible) and the bead size. Two different flow regimes leading to three different deposit morphologies are observed as a function of the initial aspect ratio a, whatever the substrate properties and the bead size. For a≲3, the granular mass spreads through an avalanche on its flanks producing either truncated cone or conical deposits. For a≳3, the upper part of the column descends conserving its shape while the foot of the pile propagates radially outward. The obtained deposit looks like a “Mexican hat” and the slope angle at the foot of the deposit is observed to saturate at a value of the order of 5°. For a given ground and bead size, the flow dynamics and the deposit morph...

https://www.ipgp.jussieu.fr/~mangeney/etal_exp.pdf

François Legros

Papers

The mobility of long-runout landslides