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Fracture (geology) A fractured rock in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, a mechanism of brittle deformation in response to stress. A fracture is any separation in a geologic formation, such as a joint or a fault that divides the rock into two or more pieces. A fracture will sometimes form a deep fissure or crevice in the rock.
Structural geology is the study of the three-dimensional distribution of rock units with respect to their deformational histories. The primary goal of structural geology is to use measurements of present-day rock geometries to uncover information about the history of deformation (strain) in the rocks, and ultimately, to understand the stress ...
The two main disciplines of geomechanics are soil mechanics and rock mechanics.Former deals with the soil behaviour from a small scale to a landslide scale. The latter deals with issues in geosciences related to rock mass characterization and rock mass mechanics, such as applied to petroleum, mining and civil engineering problems, such as borehole stability, tunnel design, rock breakage, slope ...
e. Geodynamics is a subfield of geophysics dealing with dynamics of the Earth. It applies physics, chemistry and mathematics to the understanding of how mantle convection leads to plate tectonics and geologic phenomena such as seafloor spreading, mountain building, volcanoes, earthquakes, faulting. It also attempts to probe the internal ...
absolute dating. The process of determining a specific date (in years or some other unit of time) for an archaeological, geological or paleontological site or artifact. accident. A sudden discontinuity of ground, such as a fault of great thickness, bed or lentil of unstable ground. [1] accretion.
Rock mass plasticity. Boudinaged quartz vein (with strain fringe) showing sinistral shear sense, Starlight Pit, Fortnum Gold Mine, Western Australia. In geotechnical engineering, rock mass plasticity is the study of the response of rocks to loads beyond the elastic limit. Historically, conventional wisdom has it that rock is brittle and fails ...
Fault friction describes the relation of friction to fault mechanics. Rock failure and associated earthquakes are very much a fractal operation (see Characteristic earthquake ). The process remains scale-invariant down to the smallest crystal. Thus, the behaviour of massive earthquakes is dependent on the properties of single molecular ...
Anderson's theory of faulting. Anderson's theory of faulting, devised by Ernest Masson Anderson in 1905, is a way of classifying geological faults by use of principal stress. [1][2] A fault is a fracture in the surface of the Earth that occurs when rocks break under extreme stress. [3] Movement of rock along the fracture occurs in faults.