{"id":40139,"date":"2022-02-07T08:00:14","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T08:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=40139"},"modified":"2022-02-07T08:00:57","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T08:00:57","slug":"northampton-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2022\/02\/07\/northampton-1\/","title":{"rendered":"An unusual embankment failure near to Northampton"},"content":{"rendered":"

An unusual embankment failure near to Northampton<\/h4>\n

In the late autumn of in 2021 I was driving south from Sheffield to visit my daughter near to London in the UK.\u00a0 I was on the M1 motorway close to the town of Northampton, in heavy traffic, when I fleetingly spotted what appeared to be surprisingly large, very new landslide in an embankment<\/a>.\u00a0 The location was very close to junction 15A; the landslide was in a newly constructed, steep berm around a new warehouse site.<\/p>\n

Of course, it wasn’t possible to stop to take a look, so my view of the site was very brief.\u00a0 I drove the same road this weekend – the failure has now been excavated.<\/p>\n

However, interestingly, the landslide has been captured on Google Street view<\/a>, from several perspectives.\u00a0 This image was collected in October 2021:-<\/p>\n

\"The

The embankment failure near to Northampton. Image from Google StreetView<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The location is 52.207, -0.933.\u00a0 The most recent Google Earth image shows the embankment under construction in September 2021.<\/p>\n

This is an alternative view from a few metres further along the road:-<\/p>\n

\"Another

Another view of the embankment failure near to Northampton. Image from Google StreetView<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This appears to be a rotational failure<\/a> \/ slump<\/a> in the embankment.\u00a0 The mechanisms of failure are quite complex, with considerable plastic deformation on the margins of the failed block:-<\/p>\n

\"Detailed

Detailed view of the embankment failure near to Northampton. Image from Google StreetView<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, there is nothing online about this landslide.\u00a0 I’m quite intrigued by two aspects of it though.\u00a0 First, what caused this section of the embankment to fail whilst the remainder of the embankment remains intact?\u00a0 Was it built to a different specification (for example different materials or drainage), or using a different method, or is there something about the ground conditions that meant that it was susceptible to failure?<\/p>\n

And second, the remaining embankment is remarkably steep and high.\u00a0 How confident can the designers be that a similar failure won’t happen at another location on this embankment?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google StreetView has imaged the aftermath of an unusual embankment failure near to Northampton at a warehouse construction site in the UK <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":40142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,3],"tags":[580,469,30677,30676,133],"class_list":["post-40139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-images","category-landslide-report","tag-embankment","tag-featured","tag-google-streetview","tag-northampton","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}