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🏚️ Soil Liquefaction During Earthquakes

Explore how strong earthquake shaking can turn loose, saturated sandy soil into a liquid-like mass, causing buildings to sink, tilt, or float and slopes to flow.

Civil Engineering & Structural Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS💧 Water 🌍 Earth

The simulator shows a cross-section of saturated sandy soil beneath a simple structure, letting users apply earthquake-like cyclic shaking and watch pore water pressure rise in real time as loosely packed grains attempt to rearrange, visually tracking the collapse of effective stress and the resulting sinking, tilting, or floating of objects at the surface.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Choose a soil condition, such as loose saturated sand, dense saturated sand, dry sand, or clay, set the shaking intensity and duration to represent a given earthquake magnitude, then run the simulation to watch pore pressure build up, grains rearrange, and surface structures respond, comparing outcomes across the different soil types side by side.

💡 Did You Know?

During the 1964 Niigata earthquake, some apartment buildings tilted so far that residents were photographed walking out through windows onto the ground, while the buildings' concrete frames remained essentially undamaged, because the entire failure happened in the liquefied soil beneath them rather than in the structures themselves.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore how strong earthquake shaking can turn loose, saturated sandy soil into a liquid-like mass, causing buildings to sink, tilt, or float and slopes to flow.

liquefactionearthquakegeotechnicalsoil mechanicsseismologypore water pressurefoundation engineering

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install