Sliding

Meanings of Sliding

Sliding is the process and the result of slipping or slipping: to move an element carefully across a surface, to make something arrive overcoming a difficulty, to flow in a certain direction or to deliver something in a sneaky way. See Abbreviation Finder for acronyms related to Sliding.

The concept is usually used with respect to the movement of earth that is generated by an unstable slope. This instability causes part of the ground to slide over another area. A low-intensity earthquake and heavy rain can also cause a landslide.

In October 1963 a tragic landslide occurred in Italy. The filling of the Vajont Dam reservoir caused millions of cubic meters of rock and earth to slide, which in turn caused the displacement of millions of cubic meters of water. The result was the formation of a tsunami that destroyed several towns and left nearly 2,000 dead.

The dam known as the Vajont dam is located in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, more precisely in the province of Pordenone, and is no longer in use today. Its construction took place two years before the incident, and its dimensions placed it among the highest in the world.

It can be said that a landslide is a movement of stones, vegetation and earth that occurs due to the lack of firmness of the ground. This movement can be fast or slow, depending on the case.

In the most severe cases, a landslide can kill large numbers of people, as happened with the Vajont Dam in 1963. It can also cause significant material losses, destroying homes and flooding roads.

Debris slides can even occur when tons of debris accumulates on mountains and is created in landfills. In April 2017, more than twenty people died in Sri Lanka due to a landslide of this type.

In the field of physics, sliding is one of the many phenomena studied, to provide as much data as possible to help us analyze it and, if we wish, cause it. In this case we are not talking about land masses, although through this science we can also explain the aforementioned accidents, but rather the basic representation tells us about the sliding of a body on an inclined plane.

The body in question, a perfectly polished sphere, moves with a uniformly accelerated rectilinear motion, that is, its progress has constant speed and occurs in a perfectly straight line. If we place it on a plane with a certain inclination, given the combination with other properties, it will slide towards the center of gravity; Although forces such as friction and other obstacles could slow down the sphere or alter its speed, in the theoretical example there are no such problems.

The sliding occurs because all bodies are subjected to the attraction of the force of gravity that our planet constantly exerts; If we add to that the location on an inclined plane and low or zero friction values, they are expected to start descending until the ground slope is much less or zero, or until an obstacle forces them to stop.

With respect to the value of acceleration, in this case it is greater the more inclined the plane is. In free fall, where the angle between the Earth and the path of the body is right (ie, 90°), the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared. For surfaces with different angles of inclination, the equation consists of multiplying said value of maximum gravity by the sine of the angle.

Sliding

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