Abstract
Real-time early warning systems for shallow landslides are typically built upon real-time measurements and forecasts of rainfall and empirical correlations between past patterns of rainfall and landslide occurrence. Whereas these relationships describe whether certain combinations of rainfall and preexisting groundwater levels are of elevated risk of landslide triggering, not all combinations leading to landslide events necessarily have the same consequences in terms of landslide mobility (velocity and distal reach of the landslide). In this paper, the technique of geotechnical centrifuge modeling is used to quantitatively evaluate the hypothesis that the mobility of a landslide triggered under elevated antecedent groundwater conditions is higher than scenarios under drier antecedent conditions. Five identical slope models with a shallow depth to bedrock were subjected to different antecedent conditions ranging from zero groundwater flux to nearly saturated conditions prior to rainfall. The results from these scenarios show that higher antecedent groundwater conditions can result in landslides with velocities about three times higher and travel distances about eight times higher than low antecedent conditions due to static liquefaction of the soil at the base of the slope.
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Acknowledgments
This study was financially supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the Discovery, Discovery Accelerator Supplement, Research Tools and Instruments, and Major Resources Support grant programs. Additional funding for equipment and sensors was provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the work of former research student Jeff Kemp in conducting the centrifuge testing program, and the support and assistance of the C-CORE centrifuge team (Gerry Piercey, Don Cameron, and Derry Nicholl) in performing the physical modeling.
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Take, W.A., Beddoe, R.A., Davoodi-Bilesavar, R. et al. Effect of antecedent groundwater conditions on the triggering of static liquefaction landslides. Landslides 12, 469–479 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-014-0496-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-014-0496-7