ABSTRACT
The Vajont landslide of October 9, 1963, has been the subject of numerous geological and geomechanical investigations, due both to its potential contribution to slope stability analysis and to the social and legal implications of the disaster. A new landslide model is proposed by improving on an existing one, which is able to interpret using a simple 1-D mechanism the post-failure sliding regime of catastrophic landslides and rockslides consisting of a coherent mass sliding on a thin clayey layer. The soil constitutive model is then employed into an existing landslide model. The resulting model equations are shown to be well-posed, and then are discretised and integrated numerically to back-analyse the final stage of the well-documented case history of Vajont that occurred in Italy in 1963. A thermo-poro-mechanical landslide model has been derived by Vardoulakis from first principles, and successfully employed to back-analyse the catastrophic sliding phase of the Vajont slide.
