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Experimental study on cascading landslide dam failures by upstream flows

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Abstract

Landslide dams in mountainous areas are quite common. Typically, intense rainfalls can induce upstream flows along the sloping channel, which greatly affects the stability and failure modes of landslide dams. If a series of landslide dams are sequentially collapsed by an incoming mountain torrent (induced by intense rainfall), large debris flows can be formed in a short period of time. This also amplifies the magnitude of the debris flows along the flow direction. The catastrophic debris flows, which occurred in Zhouqu, China on August 8, 2010, were indeed caused by intense rainfall and the upstream cascading failure of landslide dams along the gullies. Experimental tests were conducted in a sloping channel to understand the dynamic process of cascading landslide dam failures and their effect on flow scale amplification. Similar to the Zhouqu conditions, the modeled landslide dams were distributed along a sloping channel and breached by different upstream flows. For each experiment, the front flows were sampled, the entrained grain sizes were analyzed, and the front discharge along the channel was measured. The results of these experiments show that landslide dams occurring along the channel can be destroyed by both high and low discharge flows, although the mechanisms are quite different for the two flow types. Regardless of flow type, the magnitude of the flows significantly increases after a cascading failure of landslide dams, resulting in an increase in both the diameter and the entrained coarse particles percentage.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge financial support from the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (grant no. 2011CB409902), the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41030742), and the Hundred Young Talents Program of the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment. The technical support from DDFORS is also gratefully acknowledged. Finally, the authors thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for the detailed remarks and helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Mountain Hazards and Earth Surface Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, China

    Gordon G. D. Zhou, P. Cui, H. Y. Chen, X. H. Zhu & J. B. Tang

  2. Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences & Ministry of Water Conservancy, Chengdu, China

    Gordon G. D. Zhou, P. Cui, H. Y. Chen, X. H. Zhu & J. B. Tang

  3. State Key Laboratory for Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Q. C. Sun

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  1. Gordon G. D. Zhou
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  2. P. Cui
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  3. H. Y. Chen
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  4. X. H. Zhu
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  5. J. B. Tang
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Correspondence to P. Cui.

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Zhou, G.G.D., Cui, P., Chen, H.Y. et al. Experimental study on cascading landslide dam failures by upstream flows. Landslides 10, 633–643 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-012-0352-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-012-0352-6

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