Problems of structural landslides in the Polish Flysch Carpathians in the light of unified criteria of the mass movement classifications - A critical review

Geological classification of the rocky landslides in the Polish Flysch Carpathians is rather oversimplified and incorrectly used. This is especially the case of the "structural landslide" type and related terminology, which are too often used by researchers also for description of landslides which are not displaced along structural discontinuities developed in strongly anisotropic flysch rock massifs. Such an approach has been used by a number of authors and is the reason why deep-seated landslides were commonly incorrectly characterized and classified as "structural" ones. The studies of the Carpathian rocky landslides recently conducted by the author with the use of tectonic analysis, confirmed occurrence of all the types of mass movements including toppling, lateral spreading, translational and rotational and compound slides and rock flow as well as the complex landslide which represents the combined type of various gravitational displacements according to the classification of International Geotechnical Societies'UNESCO Working Party on World Landslide Inventory. In the light of this classification, the structural landslide represents only one type of these phenomena, i.e. translational landslide. In the article, the author tries to elaborate proper definition and description of the "structural landslide" criteria sensu Kleczkowski (1955) and Bober (1984)