Soil squeaks give early warning of infrastructure collapse

The concrete and the clay beneath my feet begin to crumble, as the popular 1960s song goes. It’s a case of truth in art. Structures sitting on or in earth – which represent most of the built environment – can seem perfectly stable for decades, and then collapse without warning.

Such disasters have been seen recently in the UK, with the collapse of the Whaley Bridge dam in Derbyshire and in Brazil, where a mining dam suddenly collapsed in February causing over 200 deaths.

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One reason for such collapses is that earth is a complex and unpredictable material. It is composed of particles of widely varying sizes and shapes, and changing conditions, such as variable loading and moisture, can cause a previously stable area to start deforming.

Once this process begins, it is very difficult to predict how the constituent particles of the earth will interact with each other, and whether structures supported by this region will remain stable.