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The status evaluation of the permafrost environment along the Chaida’er-Muli Railway in southern Qilian Mountains in northern Qinghai Province, China

  • Mountain Environment
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Abstract

Engineering construction has major influence on the permafrost environment. This paper analyzes the interaction between engineering construction and permafrost environment along the Chaidaer-Muli Railway (simply, CMR) based on the press-state-response (PSR) framework. The permafrost environmental system is divided into three subsystems, consisting of permafrost thermal stability, proneness to the freeze-thawing erosion and permafrost ecological fragility. Each subsystem considers its most important influencing factors. Catastrophe Progression Method (CPM) is applied to calculate the current environment condition along the railway. The result indicates that: (1) as far as the thermal stability is concerned, most sections along the CMR are mainly concentrated in rank III (fair situation), and a few in II (good situation) and IV (bad situation), respectively; (2) for the proneness to the freeze-thawing erosion, the entire railway route falls largely in rank II (good situation); (3) along the CMR, the ecological fragility of the permafrost environment is in rank II (good situation), or slightly fragile; (4) overall, the permafrost environments along the CMR are in rank III (fair situation) or II condition (good situation). In general, the permafrost environment along the CMR is fair. It is mainly because a series of active measures of protecting permafrost were taken for stabilizing the CMR foundation soils. On the one hand, we should try our best to minimize the influences that engineering activities have exerted on ecology and environment, on the other hand, the positive measures have made improvements to prevent the permafrost environment from deterioration.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (No. 2013CBA01803), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41271084 and 41501079), the Project Funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2015M582724 and 2016T90962), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Key Research Program (No. KZZD-EW-13). The authors are grateful for valuable comments and suggestions for improvements from the anonymous referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou Gansu, 730000, China

    Wei Cao, Yu Sheng, Ji-chun Wu, Jing Li & Sheng-ting Wang

  2. Key Laboratory of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation in Civil Engineering of Gansu Province, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou Gansu, 730000, China

    Ya-ling Chou

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  1. Wei Cao
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  2. Yu Sheng
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  3. Ya-ling Chou
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  4. Ji-chun Wu
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  5. Jing Li
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  6. Sheng-ting Wang
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Correspondence to Yu Sheng.

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http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2963-267X

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http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8999-611X

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Cao, W., Sheng, Y., Chou, Yl. et al. The status evaluation of the permafrost environment along the Chaida’er-Muli Railway in southern Qilian Mountains in northern Qinghai Province, China. J. Mt. Sci. 13, 2124–2134 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-016-3947-x

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