A Review on Past Cases of Geophysical Explorations for Assessment of Slope Stability

Abstract

Since landslide can cause huge damages to many facilities, close characterization of slopes is needed for appropriate reinforcements for the unstable ones in order to prevent the damages. Geophysical surveys, which can characterize a large area at a relatively low cost without disturbing slopes, have been widely employed for the assessment of slope stability in other countries. However, only conventional direct investigation methods are mainly used in Korea. In this paper, we analyzed various cases, which evaluated slope stabilities by characterizing slopes using geophysical exploration. First, we introduced changes in geophysical properties due to unstable media of slope like fracture location, fracture connectivity and distribution of groundwater level, and subsequently discussed the applicability of geophysical methods to the detection of the changes; the methods include electrical resistivity survey, seismic survey, self-potential survey, induced polarization survey and ground penetrating radar. Based on this description, we analyzed how geophysical surveys were performed on various slopes.