Bank collapse

Figure 4.6. Excavator on a rising tide in an outfall trench. Problem caused by bank collapse. Despite appearances the machine was recovered before inundation by the rising tide (courtesy May Gurney)...

The Old Kingdom monuments have a curiously modern feel and their scale couples them to latter-day civil engineering solutions. However inappropriate it may be, it is impossible not to back-engineer our own concepts into the mindsets of the ancients so alien to us now. Simultaneously, some things unfathomable may be carried forward to us - conventions of construction and excavation that we maintain but that relate only to some requirement long since lost. Their resolution of the problems of stability must have stemmed from the close observations of slope failures, familiar from the bank collapses in the canal systems and the shifting sands of the Nile delta. They grasped patterns and projected them onto the unknown conditions that they wished to control and their built-up multi-cored forms weathered with veneers of polished stone have lasted millennia. 

Mountainside River Bank collapse Debri flow in stream channels, Water flow routes blocking by rocks. ... 

Even more banks had collapsed in the panic of 1893 (Davies 2002, 502). 

In rugged terrain, where collapse of bank material into the channel is common, sediment from as near the centre of the stream as possible should be collected to avoid sampling bank-slip material. 

For example, If a knife coater Is used, the foam must be sufficiently stable to form a stable rolling bank behind the coating knife. Should the foam begin to collapse prematurely, uneven dyeing will be the result. 

It is speculated that a chromium hydride or alkyl species is formed, but the exact mechanism for its formation is not known, though approximately six decades have elapsed since the basic discoveries of Hogan and Banks. The hydride (or alkyl) initially forms a n-complex with ethylene. The ii-complex collapses to an alkylchromium moiety that serves as the active center for the polymerization (eq 5.2). 

In October 1997 a fourth dam, this time made of sand and concrete, was constructed. This was a 14-km long and 30-m wide dam [7] that remained until 22nd April 1999. On that date a strong storm raced through Kazakhstan and the combined efforts of waves and winter ice led once more to the dam s break-up. Before the dam s collapse water level was about 42.8 m and by September 1999 the sea level decreased by 2.5 m. In 2003-2005 a fifth dam was built by a Russian company called Zarubezhvodstroy with the financial support of the World Bank. This dam has been in operation since August 2005 and we have observed a steady increase of sea level since that time [3,6]. 

Fig. 8-5. Rubredoxin on pyrophyllite. When proteins are placed into the interlayer space of a 2 1 clay mineral, the interactions of the protein with the mineral surface compete with intraprotein nonbonded interactions, (a) The crystal structure of rubredoxin taken from the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank is shown in the interlayer space of pyrophyllite, which has been artificially expanded to 5 nm. (b) During the course of NVT molecular dynamics simulation, end groups of the protein begin to interact with, and migrate along, the mineral surface, (c) When the system is then subjected to NPT molecular dynamics, the interlayer space collapses, compressing the protein from a diameter of 3.6 to 2,4 nm.

Bank of England 1995. Extract from Report of the Board of Banking Supervision Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Collapse of Barings, July 1995, http //www.numa.eom/rel7barings/bar00.htm. 

The idea that we need our world economy to grow for it to be healthy must be treated with caution. If population grows, then growth of supplies is needed. Apart from that, it would seem that the economic and banking crisis of 2008-2009 shows us that growth is chiefly needed to satisfy greed, and leads to collapse. Sustainability is a much more relevant criterion. 

The collapse of the Soviet Block had an especially severe impact on the Russian science and engineering system e.g., the Academogorodok (Russian academic semi-city in Nowosybirsk in Siberia) suffered from unemployment and brain-drain related emigration (Bird 1994). Another example was the destruction of the seed bank in the Institute of Plant Industry in Petersburg, where a unique plant collection that survived the Second World War was destroyed in order to make space for luxury housing (Rosenthal 2010). 

---