Abstract
In Canada’s north, slope stability is a critical issue affecting infrastructure. There are several types of landslides and ground hazard features that are directly related to the presence of permafrost: active layer detachment slides, retrogressive thaw flows, solifluction, thermo-karstic depressions, and rock glaciers.
A landslide inventory and preliminary susceptibility assessment of debris flows and rockfalls/rock slides were carried out for a proposed pipeline route along the Yukon Alaska Highway Corridor (YAHC). The YAHC covers a linear distance of 950 km with a 40 km width. A total of 2,018 geohazard features including 1743 landslides were identified, which represents about 1 landslide per 17 km2. Prominent landslide types included debris slides (31 %), debris flows and fans (28 %), rock slides (11 %), solifluction (8 %), earth slides/flows (5 %), thermo-karstic depressions (5 %), rockfalls (4 %), and combined retrogressive thaw flows and active layer detachments (1 %). Rock glaciers were also identified (6 %).
The qualitative heuristic debris flow susceptibility map indicates that 73 % of the debris flow deposits occur downstream from a high susceptibility zone and 23 % downstream from the moderate susceptibility zone. For the qualitative heuristic rockfall/rock slide susceptibility map, 76 % of the known failures occur in the high susceptibility zone and 17 % in the moderate susceptibility zone. Thus, as preliminary qualitative landslide susceptibility mapping, this is considered a good correlation between the maps and landslide inventory.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The project was funded by the Program for Energy Research and Development (PERD) and the Environmental Geoscience Program at Natural Resources Canada. The authors wish to thank the Yukon Geological Survey for in-kind support as well as P. vonGaza for technical assistance in the field and with satellite imagery. Critical reviews from P. Bobrowsky have greatly improved the manuscript.
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Blais-Stevens, A., Lipovsky, P., Kremer, M., Couture, R., Page, A. (2013). Landslide Inventory and Susceptibility Mapping for a Proposed Pipeline Route, Yukon Alaska Highway Corridor, Canada. In: Margottini, C., Canuti, P., Sassa, K. (eds) Landslide Science and Practice. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31319-6_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31319-6_30
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