“…Grain breakage is a fundamental issue for the stability of earth dams, embankments and railway ballasts, and for the bearing capacity of piles (e.g., Daouadji et al, 2011;Okonta, 2015;Winter et al, 2017). Quantitative information about the shearing history can be retrieved from glacial sediments (Altuhafi and Baudet, 2011) and landslide granular deposits (Zhang and McSaveney, 2017), and can be crucial for understanding the likelihood of the latter to exhibit further instability (Hu et al 2017(Hu et al , 2018a(Hu et al , 2018b(Hu et al , 2018cFan et al, 2018). Extensive fragmentation has been also related to frictional weakening in rock avalanches, although the issue is still debated (Davies et al, 1999;Fan et al, 2017;Scaringi et al, 2017Scaringi et al, , 2018Ren et al, 2018) and further, dedicated experimental investigations are required.…”