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Investigation of Stability of the Critical Rock Blocks that Initiated the Jiweishan Landslide in China

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Abstract

The objective of the paper is to investigate the initiation of the Jiweishan landslide by simulating the field geological conditions around and inside a selected critical rock block and then to study its stability through 3-D discontinuum stress analysis. The study led to the following main conclusions: (1) The mining excavations that occurred underneath the investigated block at the landslide site, the friction angle of T2 discontinuities and sliding plane and the dip angle of the sliding plane seem to be the most important factors with respect to the instability of the investigated block; (2) It seems that the friction angle of T2 discontinuities and sliding plane need to drop to a value between 5° and 10° for the investigated block to be unstable. This means that the rainfall and karstification have played important roles in reducing the said friction angle and contributed to the failure of the investigated block. (3) The northern part of the investigated block (key block) had moved out first from the top of the mountain in a direction parallel to the strike of the north boundary discontinuity plane (T2) and had undergone shear failure on the T2 surface as well as on a weak shale layer (the sliding plane) and the remaining part of the investigated block (driving block) had moved along a direction slightly east of the north direction and had undergone shear failure on the sliding plane and separation from southern and western boundary discontinuity planes (T0 and T1) to fill the empty space created by the key block to initiate the Jiweishan landslide.

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Acknowledgments

The second author of this paper is grateful to the Chinese Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201206410006) for providing a scholarship to conduct the research as a Visiting Research Student at the University of Arizona.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rock Mass Modeling and Computational Rock Mechanics Laboratories, The University of Arizona, 1235 E. James E. Rogers Way, Mines Bldg., Rm. 131, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Pinnaduwa H. S. W. Kulatilake & Yunfeng Ge

  2. Faculty of Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, Hubei, China

    Yunfeng Ge

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  1. Pinnaduwa H. S. W. Kulatilake
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  2. Yunfeng Ge
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Correspondence to Pinnaduwa H. S. W. Kulatilake.

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Kulatilake, P.H.S.W., Ge, Y. Investigation of Stability of the Critical Rock Blocks that Initiated the Jiweishan Landslide in China. Geotech Geol Eng 32, 1291–1315 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10706-014-9806-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10706-014-9806-z

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