Modeling Earthquake-induced Landslide initiation using the Fibre Bundle Model

Abstract

Co-seismic landslides are triggered by strong ground shaking in mountainous areas, resulting in threats to human activity and infrastructure. Methods for physically-based modelling of co-seismic landslide triggering play an important role in disaster prevention and mitigation. Current approaches, however, focus on direct and full failure of sloping rocks and soils,and do not cover the dynamics of partial damage and post-earthquake stability. In order to specify the seismic effect and simulate the dynamic failure process, we propose the use of Fibre Bundle Model (FBM), a mathematical framework to simulate the highly nonlinear behaviour of the progressive damage and breakdown of disordered media statistically. Soil on slopes are considered as bundles of fibres with a certain strength probability distribution. The damage in soil structure gradually increment during ground shaking. Our approach, integrating seismic forcing into the method, allows for prediction of partial damage, as well as full failure. We reach good validation results (AUC of 0.78). Due to the underlyingprinciples, the partial damage can be interpreted as a deterministic partial damage, or as a proxy for failure probability. The partial damage could be critical in predicting the impact of post-seismic landslide effects.