The first international workshop on soil crushability was held in Sheffield, U.K. on September 1997 and was the origin of a subsequent series of meetings starting with the “International Workshop on Soil Crushability” IWSC’99 atYamaguchi University in Ube, Japan on July 1999. As a result of these workshops, the research area widened from soil crushability to a re-assessment of fundamental aspects of soil mechanics theories using micromechanics.

Geotechnical failures, specially the catastrophic ones, are an excellent experience and a source of inspiration to improve our current understanding of phenomena and our procedures and tools for analysis and prediction. This unconventional manner to learn Geomechanics is the essence of this book. In general, Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical text books describe first the concepts and the theoretical developments and then apply them to interpret or solve a particular application. This book has a different approach. The case (a failure) is first described and then an explanation is sought. This approach is developed through a set of steps which can be summarized as follows.

Just a few days after I started working at a deep underground hard rock mine as a geotechnical engineer, a double fatality happened. Two miners carrying a heavy pump up a decline were killed by a rockfall. Investigation that took place described the accident as “unpredictable” and stated that the support was adequate for the prevailing conditions. One day, soon after the rockfall, whe I was walking up the decline, I noticed that at that particular spot there were some wet patches at the back and some water trickling at one sidewall.

Geomorphology is the study of earth-surface processes and forms. As a component of the fields of geology and geography, geomorphology is particularly concerned with change: progressive changes through time or changing spatial distributions at the earth’s surface. Geomorphology as a science views the objects of its study as collections of elements in complex systems that are groupings of forms and related processes. Because these groupings have regional manifestations strongly controlled by geologic materials and structures, the geomorphic systems of North America have a definable regional expression that serves as a method of organizing knowledge. The Geological Society of America’s publication series celebrating the Decade of North American Geology and the Centennial of the founding of the organization is generally organized according to geographic regions, so it is appropriate that this companion volume to the series also adopts a regional framework (Figs. 1 and 2).

The geomorphologic divisions of the continent depicted in Figure 2 are broad generalizations. Discussions in subsequent chapters that more specifically define the extent of each division use boundaries suggested by workers several decades ago.