page_title: Lateral earth pressure
hierarchical_section_title: Lateral earth pressure
caption_attribution_description: English: A fence and retaining wall on a street in Freemans Bay, Auckland City, New Zealand. The earth pressure behind it has slowly started to cause leaning of this wall (note that the earth behind it reaches almost up to the height of the fence, and slopes upwards even further behind).
context_page_description: Lateral earth pressure is the pressure that soil exerts in the horizontal direction. The lateral earth pressure is important because it affects the consolidation behavior and strength of the soil and because it is considered in the design of geotechnical engineering structures such as retaining walls, basements, tunnels, deep foundations and braced excavations.
  The earth pressure problem dates from the beginning of the 18th century, when Gautier listed five areas requiring research, one of which was the dimensions of gravity-retaining walls needed to hold back soil. However, the first major contribution to the field of earth pressures was made several decades later by Coulomb, who considered a rigid mass of soil sliding upon a shear surface. Rankine extended earth pressure theory by deriving a solution for a complete soil mass in a state of failure, as compared with Coulomb's solution which had considered a soil mass bounded by a single failure surface. Originally, the Rankine's theory considered the case of only cohesionless soils. However, this theory has subsequently been extended by Bell to cover the case of soils possessing both cohesion and friction.
context_section_description: Lateral earth pressure is the pressure that soil exerts in the horizontal direction. The lateral earth pressure is important because it affects the consolidation behavior and strength of the soil and because it is considered in the design of geotechnical engineering structures such as retaining walls, basements, tunnels, deep foundations and braced excavations. 
  The earth pressure problem dates from the beginning of the 18th century, when Gautier listed five areas requiring research, one of which was the dimensions of gravity-retaining walls needed to hold back soil. However, the first major contribution to the field of earth pressures was made several decades later by Coulomb, who considered a rigid mass of soil sliding upon a shear surface. Rankine extended earth pressure theory by deriving a solution for a complete soil mass in a state of failure, as compared with Coulomb's solution which had considered a soil mass bounded by a single failure surface. Originally, the Rankine's theory considered the case of only cohesionless soils. However, this theory has subsequently been extended by Bell to cover the case of soils possessing both cohesion and friction. Caquot and Kerisel [6] modified Muller-Breslau's equations to account for a nonplanar rupture surface.
caption: An example of lateral earth pressure overturning a retaining wall
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