The subject of rock mechanics started in the 1950s from a rock physics base and gradually became a discipline in its own right during the 1960s. As explained in the Preface, rock mechanics is the subject concerned with the response of rock to an applied disturbance, which is considered here as an engineering, . a man-induced, disturbance. For a natural disturbance, rock mechanics would apply to the deformation of rocks in a structural geology context, . how the folds, faults, and fractures developed as stresses were applied to the rocks during orogenic and other geological processes. However, in this book we will be concerned with rock mechanics applied to.
