Earth fissures triggered by groundwater withdrawal and coupled by geological structures in Jiangsu Province, China

Abstract

Earth fissures in Jiangsu Province, China have caused serious damages to properties, farmlands and infrastructures, and adversely affected the local or regional economic development. Under the geological and environmental background in Jiangsu Province, this paper presents the earth fissures caused by excessive groundwater withdrawal and coupled by distinctive geological structures, such as Ancient Yellow River Fault in Xuzhou karst area, and Ancient Yangtze River Course and bedrock hills in Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou area. Although all the earth fissures are triggered by groundwater exploitation, the characteristics are strongly affected by the specific geological and hydrogeological settings. In particular, in the water-thirsty Xuzhou City, the cone of depression caused by groundwater extraction enlarged nearly 20 times and the piezometric head of groundwater declined 17 m over a decade. As groundwater is extracted from the shallowly buried karst strata in the Ancient Yellow River Fault zone, the development of earth fissures is highly associated with the development of karstic cavities and sinkholes and their distribution is controlled by the Ancient Yellow River Fault with all the 17 sinkholes on the fault. On the other hand, in the rapidly developing Southern Jiangsu Province, groundwater is mainly pumped from the second confined aquifer in the Quaternary, which is distributed neither homogeneously nor isotropically. The second confined aquifer comprises more than 50 m thick sand over the Ancient Yangtze River Course, but this layer may completely miss on the riverbank and bedrock hills. With a typical drawdown rate of 4 m to 6 m per annum, the piezometric head of groundwater in the second confined aquifer has declined 76 m at Maocunyuan since 1970s and 40 m at Changjing since mid-1980s, and a large land subsidence, e.g. 1 100 mm at Maocunyuan, is triggered. Coupled with the dramatic change of the bedrock topography that was revealed through traditional geological drilling and modern seismic reflection methods, the geological-structure-controlled differential settlement and earth fissures are phenomenal in this area.

Application of InSAR and Gravimetry for Land Subsidence Hazard Zoning in Aguascalientes, Mexico

“…The mechanism leading to the generation of subsidence due to groundwater extraction and associated faulting is well-known [7,[36][37][38][39][40]. Nevertheless, the ability to calculate time, location, speed and magnitude of subsidence is limited due to the difficulty to determine the parameters that control the process [41,42].…”

Three-dimensional numerical modeling of land subsidence in Shanghai, China

“…It has been clearly demonstrated that groundwater pumping creates horizontal displacements at local and regional scales (Burbey and Helm 1999). Tensional strain resulting from horizontal displacements can generate ground ruptures/ earth fissures with local damage to the surface and subsurface infrastructure (Wang et al 2009); hence, the development of a more realistic and accurate geomechanical model, which requires determination of the 3D deformation field accompanying the 3D flow field, is needed to develop more reliable predictions of both vertical and horizontal displacements. By incorporating horizontal deformation as a component of the total volume strain, which was assumed to be represented by only vertical strain in 1D models, the total volume strain is partitioned into three components (one vertical and two horizontal strain) and therefore the corresponding (1D and 3D) aquifer-system storage coefficients are potentially different.…”

Geomechanics of subsurface water withdrawal and injection

“…Likely examples are recorded in the southwestern USA Jachens and Holzer, 1982;Holzer and Galloway, 2005], central Mexico [Pacheco et al, 2006;Carre on-Freyre et al, 2010, Iran [Ziaie et al, 2009;Mahmoudpour et al, 2013], Saudi Arabia [Bankher and Al-Harthia, 1999], and China [Li et al, 2000;Shi et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2009].…”