Abstract: Based on the brittle fracture model of compacted cohesive soil in tensile stress and the smeared cracking theory,a point interpolation meshless method is proposed for a 2D simulation of crack propagation in earth dams.For a plane strain problem,the anisotropic stiffness matrix at each integration point is constructed for post-tensile failure zones.Then a meshless method is proposed for the brittle fracture in compacted cohesive soil.The nodes in the tensile stress zone are automatically refined and the influence domain of a node is defined according to the visibility criterion of a crack barrier.The minimal space between nodes is used as cracking step.This meshless method is applied to the simulation of three centrifuge model tests on crack propagation in an earth dam.The simulation results show that the combination of brittle fracture model and meshless algorithms is able to capture the initiation and propagation of cracks induced by tensile failure.