Abstract:With the development of national economy and defense,the depth of underground engineering becomes deeper and deeper,such as mines with depth of thousand to several thousands meters(for example,Jinchuan nickel mines and golden mines in South Africa),diversion tunnels with depth of more than thousand meters for hydropower engineering,deep geological deposition of nuclear waste,deep underground protection engineering(for example,air defense headquarter in northern American in 700 m deep underground rock). The engineering response of deep rock mass shows several new characteristic scientific phenomena. In comparison with responses of shallow rock engineering,these new characteristic scientific phenomena have quite different features,and can not be explained by traditional continuum mechanics completely. They attract the attentions of scholars and engineers in the fields of geotechnical engineering and rock mechanics in the world,and become the focus of the study in these fields for last several years. A new branch of rock mechanics-nonlinear deep rock mechanics is being established. The tectonic,deformation and failure problems of deep rock are suggested according to the static and dynamic characteristic scientific phenomena and the characteristics of deep rock,such as the block structure feature,the state of high earth stress,the stored energy and the nonlinearity,discontinuity and incompatibility of deformation.