『Abstract
Although landslides are a worldwide significant natural hazard,
their physics is not well understood. Here, landslides were induced
in a vibrated box filled with wet (practically cohesive) sand,
simulating natural slope failure. The questions addressed were
(a) what controls the type of slope failure and (b) what controls
frequency magnitude relations of landslides.
In the experiments, two end-member slope failure types were obtained:
during application of only horizontal acceleration, a failure
plane rapidly developed, followed by a box-sized slump. In contrast,
under application of only vertical acceleration, mode I fractures
formed slowly, dissecting the slope into blocks. The fractures
caused a strength heterogeneity and were followed by block-sliding.
In the vertical shaking experiments, a power law size distribution
of slide-blocks was measured, controlled by the fracture distribution.
The experiments suggest that heterogeneity may be a major control
on the size distribution of natural landslide inventories: In
a homogeneous environment, the landslide will have a characteristic
size of the whole system. In a heterogeneous slope, sizes of landslides
will reflect the heterogeneity.
Following the above experimental observations our hypothesis
is that natural landslides may be divided into two groups small
and large. The processes controlling their formation are different:
I. The smaller natural landslides occur as slumps within the unconsolidated,
rather homogeneous, sediments typical of the upper few
meters close to the surface. The size of these slumps is determined
by the dependence between failure depth (constrained to be the
depth of the unconsolidated sediments) and area.
II. In contrast to the homogeneous upper layer, rock mass
below the unconsolidated sediment is always heterogeneous
due to fractures, layers and bedding. This preexisting heterogeneity
is the source of the power law decay observed for the large landslide
portion in natural landslide distributions.
Finally, in light of these insights, in hazard evaluation, it
is advised to fit a regression line to the power law decay of
the large landslide inventory only and consider the characteristic
landslide separately.
Keywords: landslides; frequency magnitude; power law; characteristic
size; sand box; self-organized criticality』
1. Introduction
2. Experimental setting
3. Results
3.1. Types of slope failure
3.2. Frequency magnitude (area) relations
4. Discussion
4.1. Acceleration direction as a control on the style of
slope failure
4.2. The role of inhomogeneity in controlling slope failure size
4.2.1. Controls on size distributions - review of previous work
4.2.2. Controls on size distributions in the current experiments
4.2.3. Controls on size distributions in natural slopes
4.3. Implication to hazard analysis
5. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References