Landslide, spreading, deep seated gravitational deformation: analysis, examples, problems and proposals

Technical literature about deep seated gravitational deformations is becoming more and more copious. Anyway, it is still evident the difficulty in finding a correct and complete definition for such phenomena. This paper put in evidence the main features, problems, behavioural models and improvements starting from the existing specific literature and showing some difficulty, triviality and misunderstanding. Nomenclature problems, characteristic features, differences in describing the same or similar phenomena, phenomenological and mechanical models are summarised on the basis of more than 400 titles concerning such a theme. Eventually, few suggestions are proposed on the basis of field observations, geomechanics knowledge and mechanics principles. Simple statistical analyses of existing data have been used to identify major features, geometries and boundary conditions to be introduced in simple numerical modellings performed by finite differences techniques. Some interesting initial results are compared with case histories taken from the literature, evidencing particular deformational patterns and identifying deep seated gravitational deformation prone settings.