Publications

The Fourier power spectra of geomagnetic component values, synthesized from spherical harmonic models, have been computed for circular paths on the Earth's surface. They are not found to be more useful than is the spectrum of magnetic energy outside the Earth for the purpose of separating core and crustal sources of the geomagnetic field. The Fourier power spectra of N and E geomagnetic...

An inconvenience attending traditional use of associated Legendre functions in global modeling is that the functions are not separable with respect to the two indices (order and degree). In 1973 Merilees suggested a way to avoid the problem by showing that associated Legendre functions of order m and degree m+k can be expressed in terms of elementary functions as Pmm+k(θ)=sinm(θ)∑ki...

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The most common types of mass movements that form landslide dams are rock and soil slumps and slides; mud, debris, and earth flows: and rock and debris avalanches. The most common initiation mechanisms for dam-forming landslides are excessive rainfall and snow melt, and earthquakes. Most landslide dams are remarkable short-lived. In a sample of 63 documented cases, 22 percent of the...

The collapse of the north face of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, and the debris avalanche that resulted blocked outflow from Spirit Lake and Coldwater and South Fork Castle Creeks. Spirit Lake began to increase in size and lakes began to form in the canyons of Coldwater and South Fork Castle Creeks. Coldwater and Castle Lakes would have overtopped their respective blockages in late...

Annual losses in the United States, Japan, Italy, and India have been estimated at 1 billion or more each. During the period 1971-74, nearly 600 people per year were killed by landslides worldwide; about 90 percent of these deaths occurred in the Circum-Pacific region. From 1967-82, 150 people per year died in Japan as a result of slope failures. In the United States, the number of...

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Electric currents in long pipelines can contribute to corrosion effects that limit the pipe's lifetime. One cause of such electric currents is the geomagnetic field variations that have sources in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Knowledge of the general behavior of the sources allows a prediction of the occurrence times, favorable locations for the pipeline effects, and long-term...

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To further the understanding of the mechanics of landslide flow, we present a model that predicts many of the observed attributes of landslides. The model is based on an integration of the hyperbolic differential equations for stress and velocity fields in a two-dimensional, inclined, semi-infinite half-space of Coulomb plastic material under elevated pore pressure and gravity. Our...