This book contains contributions presented at the IUTAM Symposium "Fracture Phenomena in Nature and Technology" held in Brescia, Italy, 1-5 July, 2012.The objective of the Symposium was fracture research, interpreted broadly to include new engineering and structural mechanics treatments of damage development and crack growth and also large-scale failure processes as exemplified by earthquake or landslide failures, ice shelf break-up and hydraulic fracturing (natural or for resource extraction or CO2 sequestration), as well as small-scale rupture phenomena in materials physics including, e.g. inception of shear banding, void growth, adhesion and decohesion in contact and friction, crystal dislocation processes and atomic/electronic scale treatment of brittle crack tips and fundamental cohesive properties. Special emphasis was given to multiscale fracture description and new scale-bridging formulations capable to substantiate recent experiments and tailored to become the basis for innovative computational algorithms.
