Challenges in Developing Constitutive Relations for Earth-Mediated Materials

Explore the complex challenges of developing constitutive relations for Earth-mediated materials in this 46-minute conference talk. Delve into how Earth materials like soil, mud, ice, and rocks exist in a fuzzy state between solid and fluid depending on timescales, exhibiting soft matter behaviors including glassy dynamics, strain localization, memory encoding in microstructure, active matter properties, and complex yielding mechanisms. Examine how the unique mixtures, excitations, geometries, and scales associated with soft Earth problems present novel challenges that bridge geophysics and soft matter physics. Learn about recent research demonstrating how frontiers in these fields intersect and how combining approaches may lead to advances in both disciplines. Discover open questions and challenges related to creep and yielding in amorphous materials, multi-scale dynamics of earth materials, and geophysical field observations that demand new theoretical and experimental approaches. Gain insights into problems involving landslides, earthquakes, erosion, glaciers, and exotic transport phenomena of earth materials, presented as part of a conference designed to encourage new collaborations and novel approaches rather than focusing solely on solved problems.