Joint analysis of the Super-Sauze (French Alps) mudslide by nanoseismic monitoring and UAV-based remote sensing

Abstract

Due to global climate change and the fact that mountain areas will become inhabited at a progressive rate, landslides pose a huge threat to the environment, the infrastructure and the people living in the vicinity of affected areas. In inhabited regions landslides can cause enormous economic damage and unfortunately human losses as well. Slope instabilities are caused by the non-linear interaction of geological, hydrological, morphological, and soil mechanical processes on many scales in time and space. Models for the prediction of landslides are very vulnerable because the influencing parameters are still incompletely or unsatisfactorily observed. Therefore the observation of landslides by multiple disciplines is the challenge of recent studies. Integrated analysis should reveal further insights into the process interactions and the complex behaviour of landslides. Our research is highly motivated by newly improved measuring techniques that can resolve specific landslide parameters at higher resolution, and in repeat observations. We can determine landslide dynamics using nanoseismic monitoring (Joswig, 2008) and UAV-based (unmanned aerial vehicle) high-resolution remote sensing (Niethammer et al., 2009). With the former, one can resolve fracture processes in the shallow subsurface (Walter and Joswig, 2008; Walter and Joswig, 2009). The latter technique is especially suited for mapping the corresponding photo-lineaments at the slope’s surface. Our geophysical investigations were carried out at the Super-Sauze, French Alps mudslide (Figure 1) and the Heumoes, Austrian Alps slope. They are part of the research project ‘Coupling of flow and deformation processes for modelling the movement of natural slopes’ (www.grosshang.de).