Landslide Investigation Using Seismic Refraction Tomography Method: A Review

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, near-surface seismic refraction tomography (SRT) has been extensively used as a non-invasive and cost-effective geophysical method to characterize complex geological structures for landslide investigation. This geophysical technique is able to characterize the slope material, the sliding surface's geometry, the landslide mass movement, the physical properties of media, and the water saturation effects on the slope. Therefore, this method has become an appropriate method due to the increasing progress of novel algorithms and the improvements of field-data collection systems. In this paper, we attempt to review the essential research that investigated various types of landslides influenced by water saturation and landslide materials and identified in various areas, since the year 2000. Significant conclusions obtained by applying different survey strategies and data processing algorithms in seismic refraction surveys are widely discussed concentrating on the advantages and disadvantages of this method. The main results obtained by the few available studies applying time-lapse SRT (TLSRT) are particularly analyzed.

Geophysical Surveys for Geotechnical Model Reconstruction and Slope Stability Modelling

“…The analysis of geophysical and geotechnical data combined with the support of spatial data (DTM) allowed the reconstruction of a detailed geological model of the Theilly landslide. The HVSR investigation led to the identification of two important natural peaks, one at high frequencies (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35), which made it possible to identify the thickness of the material reworked by anthropic intervention, and one at low frequencies (3.3-4.3 Hz), attributable to a deeper level (20-30 m), characterised by a high Vs value (>800 m/s).…”

“…As reported in [17], geophysical techniques are widely used to detect subsurface properties, and study buried geometries and map landslide areas. Among the most widely used geophysical techniques employed to investigate landslides are seismic refraction, electrical tomography, passive seismic and ground penetrating radar (GPR) [14,16,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. These techniques are widely used because of their many advantages, despite some limitations.…”

Shallow Seismic Refraction Tomography Images from the Pieniny Klippen Belt (Southern Poland)

“…Seismic refraction tomography performs well in many situations where traditional seismic refraction methods fail, such as in the presence of velocity structures with both lateral and vertical velocity gradients [29,30]. SRT is commonly applied for, e.g., bedrock mapping [31][32][33], groundwater level determination [34,35], the characterization of landslide geometry [36,37], the assessment of rippability [38,39] and seepage detection [40].…”

Review article: Research progress on influencing factors, data, and methods for early identification of landslide hazards

“…However, so far, there are few review papers on early identification of potential landslide hazards, especially those based on bibliometric analysis methods. Only 20 related review documents were retrieved from WOS and Scopus, and several of them are representative, as shown in Figure 2 Lagomarsino et al, 2015;Reichenbach et al, 2018;Whiteley et al, 2019;Imani et al, 2021;Jiang et al, 2022;Bagwari et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2023). Figure 2 shows that the review documents only appeared in this filed in recent years, and it is not until 2022 that scholars began to make document review on the application of artificial intelligence methods in geological disasters by bibliometric methods.…”