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Two long-runout rock avalanches in 2022 and 2020 in an underground coal mining field in Zhijin, China

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Abstract

On 8 May 2022 and 12 April 2020, two large rock avalanches occurred in Zhijin County, China, in the villages of Baiyan and Baiwu, respectively. These long-runout rock avalanches had the same geological, hydrological, and topographical settings and similar triggering factors but different mobility, and this inspired a research interest in the failure and runout processes of large-volume mass movements. In this study, a detailed on-site field investigation was conducted with the aid of unmanned-aerial-vehicle-based photogrammetry and satellite imaging technologies. The results suggest that the two rock avalanches were, rather than a single factor, collaboratively triggered by multiple loading effects involving long-term underground coal-mining vibration, karstification, and cumulative precipitation. The cliff failure was dominated by the strength of the rock mass and development of the joints, while the runout was controlled by the dynamic performance of the soil on the potential sliding surface rather than the rock debris itself. The liquefaction performance of the sliding surface—consisting of coarse soils on an ancient eluvial slope in the transition area—indicates that the Baiyan avalanche had significantly longer runout and higher mobility than the Baiwu case. Although the two avalanches had different mobilities, they both briefly obeyed a physics-based statistical evaluation method—the energy line.

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Data availability

The data investigated in this study is available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Zhijin Meteorological Bureau for providing the meteorological data. We also thank the Gansu Data and Application Center of China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS) for providing the satellite images.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 42230715 and 42107170), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant nos. BX2021214 and 2021M702493), and the Fundamental Research Funds of China for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Kongming Yan, Fawu Wang, Weichao Liu, Bo Zhang & Jie Gao

  2. Key Laboratory of Geotechnical and Underground Engineering, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Fawu Wang

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  1. Kongming Yan
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  2. Fawu Wang
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  3. Weichao Liu
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  4. Bo Zhang
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Correspondence to Fawu Wang.

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Yan, K., Wang, F., Liu, W. et al. Two long-runout rock avalanches in 2022 and 2020 in an underground coal mining field in Zhijin, China. Landslides 20, 1465–1480 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-023-02063-1

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