Abstract
Abstract Al-Shamal train pathway, which is extended between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, is prone to geo-hazards due to the geological features, proximity to faults, earthquake epicenter, and the human activities along the pathway. The objectives of this study are to shed light on the ground subsidence susceptibility along Al-Shamal train pathway in Qarrayat city in Saudi Arabia and develop a ground subsidence susceptibility model to determine the prone areas to the impacts of ground subsidence to mitigate and avoid the loss of life and property. This study integrated the various data types to map the subsidence susceptibility along Al-Shamal train pathway. Nine ground subsidence causative parameters were selected as subsidence controlling factors in the study area including lithology, land cover/land use, elevation, slope, aspect, annual average rainfall, distance to faults, distance to earthquake epicenter, and distance to streams. The analytical hierarchy process is applied to obtain accurate weight to each criterion through the distribution of online Google form questionnaire to experts in different expertise and get their judgments on the weights of ground subsidence causative parameters in the study area. A subsidence susceptibility index was derived by classifying susceptible maps into five classes, namely, very low, low, moderate, high, and very high using the statistical distribution analysis. The results revealed that the study area is subjected to moderate susceptibility with about 32.56. A total of 29.8 and 11.52% of the study area had very low and low susceptibilities, respectively, and 8.44 and 17.68% had very high and high susceptibilities, respectively. The results were validated using the receiver operating characteristic using previous ground subsidence locations. The area under the curve showed 0.971, which is equivalent to 97.1%. Consequently, the findings of the study are thought to be beneficial to managers and decision makers for future planning, mitigating, and preventing subsidence in the study area.
Highlights
Subsidence is the sinking of the Earth’s surface relative to surrounding terrain due to ground collapse resulted from subterranean voids or a decrease in subsurface materials [1]
The results indicated that the land subsidence in Saudi Arabia is related to the soluble sediments of evaporite, carbonate rock formations sabkha deposits, and salt diapirs
In the past few decades, Saudi Arabia is exposed to natural geohazards hazards including the earthquakes, subsidence, sinkholes, and landslides, which caused losses to life, property, and infrastructures
Summary
Subsidence is the sinking of the Earth’s surface relative to surrounding terrain due to ground collapse resulted from subterranean voids or a decrease in subsurface materials [1]. Intensive rainfall is considered as an important factor in the occurrence of land subsidence [5,6,7]. [8,9], the most prominent cause of land subsidence is the structural weakness of the underground layers, which is usually caused by human activities, such as mineral extraction. The land subsidence damages include the loss of life, human. Several techniques have been applied to map ground subsidence including frequency ratio [11,12], weight of evidence [13], logistic regression [11], artificial neural network [4,11,14,15,16], fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy [4,12,17,18,19], support vector machine [20,21], geographic information system (GIS) [4,7,10,13,14], multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) [4,7,12,22], and machine learning algorithms [23]. The InSAR method has been used to map the subsidence susceptibility [12,22,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]
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