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Correlation of acoustic emissions with patterns of movement in an extremely slow moving landslide at Peace River, Alberta, Canada

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-02-09, 11:23 authored by Nancy Berg, Alister SmithAlister Smith, Shawn Russell, Neil Dixon, Don Proudfoot, Andrew Take
The Peace River region, Alberta, Canada, has experienced extensive landslide activity since deglaciation. Shear zones within weak lacustrine silt and clay layers typically experience continuous creep, damaging highway and utilities infrastructure. However, occasionally, movement accelerates and potentially catastrophic failures occur. Conventional deformation monitoring approaches provide incremental measurements with low temporal resolution and do not necessarily allow rapid changes in stability to be detected and communicated sufficiently in advance to provide early warning. The study objectives were to: (i) acquire a long-term dataset of continuous deformation measurements with high temporal resolution of a case study slope in Peace River; (ii) enhance understanding of a typical creeping Peace River slope’s behavior in response to climatic drivers; and (iii) investigate the potential of an Acoustic Emission (AE) monitoring system to provide early warning of accelerating deformation behavior. ShapeAccelArray (SAA) and AE instruments were installed, in addition to conventional inclinometers and piezometers. Measurements show that the landslide is ‘extremely slow’, moving on average 5-mm annually, and reveal seasonal activity with periods of acceleration and deceleration driven by pore-water pressures. Measured AE correlated strongly with the rate and magnitude of SAA-measured displacement, demonstrating the potential of the AE technique to warn of accelerating behavior.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.The support provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H007261, EP/D035325) and Loughborough University to Alister Smith and Neil Dixon is gratefully acknowledged.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Canadian Geotechnical Journal

Citation

BERG, N. ... et al, 2018. Correlation of acoustic emissions with patterns of movement in an extremely slow moving landslide at Peace River, Alberta, Canada. Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 55(10), pp. 1475-1488.

Publisher

NRC Research Press (© The Authors)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-02-05

Publication date

2018-02-05

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Canadian Geotechnical Journal and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1139/cgj-2016-0668.

ISSN

0008-3674

eISSN

1208-6010

Language

  • en

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