How climate change can destabilize a stable road cut
Road cuts are designed to be boring. The geometry is fixed, the weakest layer is identified, drainage is installed, and the expectation is that the slope will spend most of its life with a comfortable safety margin. Failures are supposed to be rare, event driven, and localized. What I kept wondering was simple: what happens to a road cut that is stable today when rainfall becomes more intense and more persistent? Not steeper. Not re excavated. Just exposed to a different climate. To explore that question, I built a small interactive model implemented in JavaScript as a browser based sandbox, focused on shallow planar failures in road cuts. The goal was not to predict a specific landslide at a specific site, but to isolate the mechanisms that matter and to see how a stable system can change regime under altered rainfall forcing. What follows is a mechanism driven analysis, not a calibrated forecast. The setup The geometry is kept constant across all sce...
