Identification and Mitigation of Reservoir Landslides: Cases Studied in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of China

Abstract

Reservoir landslides are one of the most common types of geohazards in reservoir areas. It is of great theoretical significance and engineering application value to carry out the identification and mitigation research of them. In the Three Gorges Reservoir area (TGRA), a series of studies were conducted on the reservoir landslides in aspects of their characteristics, evolution mechanisms, prevention and control, and forecasting by means of field investigation, monitoring and in-situ experiment, etc. Massive corpora of these research work are summarized and presented here in five aspects, with the goal of gaining insights into the effective prevention and mitigation of them: (1) the characteristics of the reservoir landslides located in the TGRA were summarized; (2) the stability evaluation methods of reservoir landslide include qualitative, limit equilibrium methods, numerical simulation methods and probabilistic methods were introduced; (3) the in-situ experiment on slipping zone soil of reservoir landslides carried out on the Huangtupo landslide was described; (4) the research progresses in reservoir landslide prevention and control was introduced; (5) the prospects of reservoir landslides forecasting based on physical-mechanical mechanism was elaborated. Based on the overview, suggests topics for future research are given to address the remaining challenges of reservoir landslides.