Sand's Approach to Yield - How Granular Materials Creep and Fail

Explore the complex behavior of granular materials like sand through this 43-minute conference talk examining how these materials transition between solid and fluid states. Delve into the fundamental physics of creep and failure mechanisms in granular systems, with particular focus on how sand and similar materials respond to stress over different timescales. Learn about the intersection of soft matter physics and geophysics, discovering how Earth materials such as soil, mud, ice, and rocks exhibit behaviors like glassy dynamics, strain localization, and memory encoding in their microstructure. Understand the novel challenges presented by the mixtures, excitations, geometries, and scales associated with soft Earth problems, and how recent research reveals that frontiers in geophysics are also frontiers in soft matter physics. Gain insights into how combining these fields may lead to advances in understanding phenomena related to landslides, earthquakes, erosion, glaciers, and exotic transport phenomena of earth materials, while exploring open questions and challenges that encourage new collaborations and novel theoretical and experimental approaches.