Gravelly soils are made up of gravel, sand, silt and clay. They are widely used in engineering applications such as rock-fill dams with clay cores, which are the main researches at present. The strength and mechanical properties of the gravelly soils are affected by the content of coarse grain, fine particles, and their adhesive states. These Properties can be verified by laboratory unconsolidated undrained triaxial tests with grain size less than 5 mm and by large scale direct-shear tests with original grain content. Fine particles of the loose gravelly slopes are released under rainfalls, alternated the structures and mechanical properties, even affected the slope stability. There are a series of large scale direct-shear tests with different coarse grain contents to study the influence of fine particles releasing and migration, results showed the strength behavior of the gravelly soils were affected by the coarse grain content （5） and the inflection coarse grain contents. In order to study the erosion features of the gravelly soil slopes on rainfall conditions and the slopes stability alteration, we had carried out one sort of artificial rainfall local and model experiments, the runoff sediment contents were monitored during the experiments. Result showed that the shapes of the slopes surface transformed periodically, runoff sediment contents were divided into five phases according to the experiment phenomena, runoff sediment contents maintained downtrend during the rain time and the downtrend was obviouslyinterpreted by one descend belt no matter the rainfall intensity and the slope angels. Particle size analysis released the deposit on the slope surface lost almost all of the clay, most of the silt and sand after the experiments, this meant the fine particles releasing, migration and accumulation process on condition of rainfall resulted in the instability factor of the slopes even induced landslide or debris flow.
In this paper, the motion and acceleration process, as well as the mechanism of a high speed and long run landslide are investigated by adopting high speed ring shear test and taking the landslide occurred at Yigong River in Bomi, Tibet on April 9, 2000 as the background. According to the motion characteristics of high-speed and long distance motion landside, the mechanism is studied under different conditions such as shear speed, consolidated drained and consolidated undrained status. Results show that high speed shearing process hinders and delays the dissipation of pore pressure, and drives pore water migrating to shear zone slowly. Both of water content and fine particle content at shear zone are obviously higher than those in other layers; and soil liquefaction occurs at shear zone in the saturated consolidated undrained ring shear tests. The effective internal friction angle of the consolidated undrained soil is much lower than that of the consolidated drained soil under ring shearing. The results also indicate that the shearing speed affecting the strength of soil to some extent. The higher the ring shearing speed is, the lower the strength of soil is. This investigation provides a preliminary interpretation of the mechanism of the motion and acceleration process of the Yigong landslide, occurred in Tibet in 2000.
