Abstract
Rock landslide failure boundaries contain large amounts of rock mass structure information, providing many details that help researchers understand the causes of landslide failure. Taking the Zhaobiyan (ZBY) landslide triggered by the 2008 MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake as an example, we systematically introduce a workflow for analyzing the structural characteristics of landslide failure boundaries using three-dimensional point clouds. First, multi-source data of the failure boundaries are obtained via terrestrial laser scanning and unmanned aerial vehicle photography. Next, on the basis of the hue, saturation, value color reconstruction technique, and the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise, more than 3,870,000 orientations and eight groups of joint faces are extracted from these data. Finally, the spacing, persistence, and roughness of the joint faces are calculated. According to the roughness, we determined that the north flank of the ZBY landslide is a smooth friction face resulting from tectonic shear. With increasing movement distance of the landslide on the slip surface, the roughness is increasingly controlled by landslide slickensides instead of the structure. Furthermore, we confirmed that both sides of the ZBY landslide are primarily controlled by planar shearing failure with the linkage of Joints J1 and J2, which are located on the north and south flanks, respectively. The damaged areas on the two flanks caused by shear failure reached 86.53% and 73.02%, respectively, of the flank areas. The main scarp is composed of wedge failures at different scales, and the area damaged by tension reached 89.28% of the main scarp area.
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(Modified from Cui et al. (2018)). The F5 fault is the middle segment of the causative fault (YX-BC) of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The ZBY landslide occurred in the block located between F3 and F4 faults, and the site is the southeastern limb of the S1 anticline
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Special appreciation goes to the editor and two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their time and valuable comments.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No . 41931296) and Sichuan Science and Technology Program (Grants Nos. 2022NSFSC1121 and 2022NSFSC1053).
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Shenghua Cui: conceptualization, investigation, resources, writing – review and editing, supervision. Yufei Liang: methodology, software, formal analysis, investigation, writing – original draft. Xiangjun Pei: project administration, funding acquisition, supervision. Luguang Luo: data curation, methodology. Qingwen Yang: conceptualization, visualization. Ling Zhu: investigation, writing – review and editing.
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Cui, S., Liang, Y., Pei, X. et al. Structural characteristics of landslide failure boundaries using three-dimensional point clouds: a case study of the Zhaobiyan landslide, China. Bull Eng Geol Environ 82, 127 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10064-023-03140-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10064-023-03140-4