Controlling factors for post-failure evolution of subaqueous landslides

Abstract

Subaqueous slope failures can evolve in various patterns. Whereas some slides run out and further evolve into highly mobile turbidity currents, others maintain a continuum-like structure and remain frontally confined. The different failure modes impose different hazard scenarios, making an understanding of their origin crucial for reliable hazard assessments. Yet many of the factors controlling their post-failure behaviour remain not well understood. In this paper, a procedure is presented for the analysis of the post-failure evolution of subaqueous landslides, using a coupled Eulerian–Lagrangian finite-element analysis approach. The procedure is applied to analyse the St Niklausen slide in Lake Lucerne (Switzerland), providing a good prediction of observed landslide features, without back-calibration of input parameters. The approach is further applied to investigate the influence of controlling parameters, highlighting effects of different strength parameters, the surrounding water and the slope stratigraphy and geometry on the landslide dynamics. The procedure presented can be generally applied to predict the post-failure evolution of subaqueous landslides and facilitates the extraction of the moving soil–water boundary, which can serve as source input for tsunami propagation modelling.