Creeping to failure – triggering of shallow landslides in sensitive clays

Research Project, 2025 – 2028

All natural slopes creep due to the gravitational forces. If there are geometrical changes e.g. due to erosion, or pore pressure changes due to extensive rainfall infiltration or extensive filling, the creep will accelerate and after some time the slope may fail. Climate change will result in more erratic rainfall patterns in the Northern hemisphere, and thus the frequency of landslides will increase. Landslides have huge economical and societal consequences, highligted by the recent incidents in Gjerdum (2020 and Stenungsund (2023). The aim of the project is to study the anthropogenic and natural processes, and their relative importance, for triggering shallow landslides in sensitive clays. The focus will be on developing models that will help identify the mechanisms, precursors and the expected time to the first failure. This will be achieved by combining advanced experimental probing with physics-based computational models that have been proven to capture the rate-dependent response of sensitive clays at system level. Additional meso-scale experiments are made to systematically study the rate effects in the overconsolidated range, as required for natural slopes that have been formed through slow erosion processes to extend the applicability of the models. Ultimately, we will be able to predict triggering mechanisms and their precursors for shallow slides in sensitive clays at field scale (100 m - 1 km) as a function of time (> 100 years).