Failure Mechanism of Jointed Rock

Abstract

The structural geologist knew for a long time that the earth’s crust is highly fractured, cracked and jointed and not, as the engineers for too long a time liked to assume, continuous, homogeneous, and isotropic and therefore the ideal solid material. This lack of appreciation of the geological facts was not purely the result of poor communication between the two disciplines — there were some practice-oriented geologists [4, 17] and fewer engineers [12, 14] who early recognized and advocated the necessity to take these structural discontinuities into consideration in the designs — but rather caused by the inability to deal analytically with such a complex material as the discontinuous medium.