ABSTRACT

Most of large scale landslides in the western part of central mountains in Japan tend to appear at the beginning of spring. This paper treats the affecting factors of snowy region’s landslides by using meteorological and laboratory soil testing data. It is pointed out that the major meteorological causes are concluded as a rapid or a long time continuous snow melting phenomena. One more another important key is the exitence of swelling soil contained much in the landslide mass. From experimental results on such soils, a constitutive equation concerned with swelling behavior was conducted. It was confirmed that the proposed equation is in a good agreement with experimental results.