Creep of frozen slopes and ice-filled rock joints under temperature variation

Abstract

Owing to climate warming trends, there has been an increasing interest in recent years in the accelerating creep of rock glaciers and frozen slopes. In the field of glaciology, the creep of glaciers has been extensively studied, observed, and analyzed for more than 100 years. Many valuable and detailed theoretical models have been proposed through the years for simulating the creep behavior of glaciers. This synthesis paper has no intention of proposing another one. Its purpose is only to supply to these models a potential geotechnical background, borrowed from the connected fields of frozen ground mechanics, rock mechanics, and the mechanics of mixtures. In particular, this paper attempts to extend some known models of mechanical behavior of unfrozen soil and rock masses to masses containing ice and to apply these models to large-scale creep of ice–rock mixtures and ice–rock interface problems under variable temperature and stress conditions.Key words: ice, rock, mixture, rock joints, slope stability, creep, temperature.