Regional Geological Disasters Research Articles

Three-Dimensional Geological Modelling in Earth Science Research: An In-Depth Review and Perspective Analysis

This study examines the development trajectory and current trends of three-dimensional (3D) geological modelling. In recent years, due to the rising global energy demand and the increasing frequency of regional geological disasters, significant progress has been made in this field. The purpose of this study is to clarify the potential complexity of 3D geological modelling, identify persistent challenges, and propose potential avenues for improvement. The main objectives include simplifying the modelling process, improving model accuracy, integrating different data sources, and quantitatively evaluating model parameters. This study integrates global research in this field, focusing on the latest breakthroughs and applications in mineral exploration, engineering geology, geological disaster assessment, and military geosciences. For example, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tilt photography technology, multisource data fusion, 3D geological modelling method based on machine learning, etc. By identifying areas for improvement and making recommendations, this work aims to provide valuable insights to guide the future development of geological modelling toward a more comprehensive and accurate “Transparent Earth”. This review underscores the global applications of 3D geological modelling, highlighting its crucial role across various sectors such as mineral exploration, the oil and gas industry, urban planning, geological hazard assessment, and geoscientific research. The review emphasizes the sector-specific importance of this technology in enhancing modelling accuracy and efficiency, optimizing resource management, driving technological innovation, and improving disaster response capabilities. These insights provide a comprehensive understanding of how 3D geological modelling can significantly impact and benefit multiple industries worldwide.

Landslide risk evaluation and its causative factors in typical mountain environment of China: a case study of Yunfu City

The urban area of Yunfu City is a typical mountain environment with the thin surface soil layer, broken terrain, and the fragile geological environment, which is a landslide hazard prone region, seriously threatening the safety of residents' lives and property. It is crucial to accurately reveal the landslide risk and its causative factors to develop regional geological disaster prediction and mitigation strategies. However, the risk assessment and cause analysis of landslides in Yunfu City are rarely studied at present. Therefore, this study selects 11 causative factors (elevation, slope, slope aspect, bedding structure, distance from fault, lithology, precipitation, distance from water, normalized vegetation index (NDVI), distance from road, and land use), and integrates the modified frequency ratio model and geographic detector method to analyze the spatial distribution pattern of landslide risk and its causative factors. The results indicate that the maximum predicted area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the average predicted AUC of the modified frequency ratio model perform best at the precision of 5, with the values of 0.83921 and 0.81872, respectively, which can accurately reveal the landslide risk evaluation in the study area. According to the experimental results, the landslide risk in the study area generally shows a trend of high in the north and low in the south. Besides, the overall risk of landslide hazards is low, with the area of very low grade and low grade accounting for 75.20% of the total area. Among the selected 11 potential factors, precipitation, NDVI, slope aspect, distance from water and slope are the main causative factors to induce landslide hazards. Furthermore, this study also describes in detail the combination of factors that are conducive to landslide hazards, which can provide a decision basis for relevant departments to carry out regional landslide hazards prevention and mitigation strategies, and can also provide a reference for geological hazard risk evaluation study in other mountain environment.

InSAR-based method for deformation monitoring of landslide source area in Baihetan reservoir, China

As a cascading disaster, the surge caused by the reservoir bank landslide seriously affects the stability of the reservoir bank and the dam body. In addition, large-scale hydropower projects are usually built in mountain and canyon areas with active geological structure movement, which provides rich material sources for the occurrence of landslides, so it is of great significance to monitor the deformation in the landslide source area of the reservoir. As science and technology have been leaping forward, a wide variety of high and novel technologies have been proposed, which can be adopted to monitor landslide deformation. It is noteworthy that InSAR is capable of monitoring target monitoring areas all time under all weathers without the need to install any equipment. In this study, the time series deformation of the main landslide source area of the Baihetan reservoir after water storage was determined based on the time series InSAR method. The average annual deformation rate of the landslide source area of the Baihetan reservoir from April 2021 to January 2023 was determined by combining the Sentinel-1 SAR data of 55 ascending tracks and 46 descending tracks. Moreover, the vegetation cover variations from April 2021 to January 2023 in the study area were determined by combining the remote sensing data of Landsat8-9. A total of four typical source areas were selected based on the field investigation to analyze the deformation monitoring results and the vegetation cover variations. As indicated by the results: 1) After water storage, the slope deformation in all source areas was larger in the short term, and the deformation rate of the lower part turned out to be more significant, and the deformation rate exceeded 334.583 mm/year. 2) On the steep slope, the effect of different types of vegetation on restraining deformation was different. The optimal effect was reported in shrubs, followed by grasslands, and the worst effect was reported in woodlands. The results of this study can provide scientific support for the prevention and control of regional geological disasters.

A Study on Risk Assessment of Geological Disasters in Pingba District of Guizhou Province Based on GIS

To conduct regional geological disaster risk evaluation zoning in a scientific and reasonable manner, and provide a decision basis for local territorial spatial planning, geological disaster risk prevention and control, and disaster prevention and mitigation work. This study, on the basis of collecting relevant data sources and field investigation, comprehensively analyzed and studied the geological environmental conditions of disaster pregnancy and the development and distribution pattern of current disasters in Pingba District, built an information volume model for susceptibility evaluation based on the influence factors of known disaster areas, and also reasonably determined the hazard and vulnerability evaluation model by combining the characteristics within Pingba District, thus making the risk evaluation of the county highly accurate, operable and scientific, and the results of its risk evaluation zone zoning are more consistent with he reality within the county. The risk evaluation methods and processes described above are synthesized with a view to providing reference and guidance for their application in similar work.

Regional Geological Disasters Emergency Management System Monitored by Big Data Platform

In order to deal with the hazards caused by geological disasters in time, an emergency management system is proposed based on association rule data mining. With the support of a big data platform, a regional geological disaster emergency management system is built based on monitoring data. In the result analysis, the association rule algorithm demonstrates high computing power in the test, which can filter the data with strong association rules. In addition, the big data platform can allow data visualization, which has good data storage capacity and disaster early warning capacity. In the simulation test of the emergency management system, it was found that the system is feasible in theory. When it is applied to the actual disaster emergency management, it wasfound that, in the face of geological disasters, the processing speed of relevant departments increased by 59.4%, and the allocation of personnel and materials wasmore reasonable. The above results show that the big data platform monitoring data can improve the regional geological disasters emergency management capacity and ensure the safety of people’s lives and property.

Research on regional landslide hazard warning model based on logistic regression

In the process of urban construction and development, landslide disaster is the main factor affecting the health and safety of local residents. How to put forward effective prevention and management measures according to the previous accumulated experience is the main problem of scientific research. Although the traditional regional geological disaster early warning model played an important role during the work, it did not comprehensively predict and analyze the regional landslide disaster and its impact due to the low prediction accuracy, insufficient application precision and insufficient data collection information. Nowadays, scientific researchers propose to use logistic regression algorithm for optimization and innovation in practice. The regional landslide disaster prediction model with logistic regression as the core can better meet the needs of practical research, master the geological disaster prediction information of the local area, and help the staff of the department to quickly develop solutions. Therefore, on the basis of understanding the application and research status of regional landslide disaster warning model, this paper deeply discusses the regional landslide disaster warning model with logistic regression algorithm as the core according to the basic principle of logistic regression algorithm. The final experimental results show that the prediction model has strong generalization ability and training accuracy.

Risk assessment and its influencing factors analysis of geological hazards in typical mountain environment

Fujian Province is a typical mountainous environment, where regional geological hazards occur frequently, posing serious threats to the safety of local residents’ lives and property and regional ecological security. Accurately revealing the risk of geological hazards in Fujian Province have important guiding significance for the local government to develop targeted prevention strategies. This study selects 8 indicators including elevation, slope, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), lithology, land use type, average annual precipitation, distance from rivers and distance from faults to construct an evaluation index system, and reveal the spatial pattern and its influencing factors of the risk of geological hazards in Fujian Province based on the information quantity model and geodetector method. The results showed that the geological hazards risk of mountainous areas in Fujian Province have an overall trend of high in the southeast and low in the northwest, and a characteristic of significant spatial agglomeration. The proportion of different levels of geological hazard risk is showed as that medium risk > medium-high risk > medium-low risk > high risk > low risk, among which, the combined area with medium and medium-high risk accounts for 76.06%. The occurrence of geological hazards in Fujian Province is the result of the combined effects of the natural environment and human activities, and the night light intensity, elevation, slope, and distance from rivers are the main influencing factors causing geological hazards. In addition, The combination of dominant factors conducive to inducing geological hazards are found, which can provide scientific basis for the formulation of regional geological disaster prevention strategies.

Risk Assessment of Debris Flow in Strong Earthquake Area

The construction and operation of the Jiuzhaigou County bidding section of the Jiumian Expressway is affected by debris flow disasters. It is important to scientifically and reasonably evaluate the debris flow risk in the engineering area. Therefore, according to the data of topography, meteorology, hydrology and regional geological structure of the project area, 12 influencing factors, such as regional geological disasters, loose material reserves along the gully and maximum punching amount at one time, are selected as the evaluation indexes of debris flow risk assessment. Based on the catastrophe progression method, a mutation model of debris flow risk assessment suitable for the project area was established. The debris flow risk assessment mutation model was used to evaluate the debris flow risk of 8 trenches in the project area, and the applicability of the model is verified by comparing the actual occurrence history of debris flow in the trench with the evaluation results. The analysis results show that the risk of debris flow in four gullies of Gangou and Xiaganzuo in the bid section project area of Jiuzhaigou County of Jiumian Expressway is extremely dangerous, and the debris flow risk of Shangganzuo gully is severe. These five debris flow gullies are the key objects of debris flow prevention and control during the construction and operation of Jiuzhaigou County bidding section of the Jiumian Expressway.

Using geographically weighted regression to predict the spatial distribution of frozen ground temperature: a case in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

This paper combines the use of principal component analysis (PCA) and the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to predict the spatial distribution of frozen ground temperature. PCA is used to reduce the multicollinearity among covariates, while the GWR model is used to address the spatially non-stationary relationship between frozen ground temperature and its predictors, such as air temperature, latitude, longitude, and vegetation cover. Our approach is applied in a typical permafrost area in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, Western China. The result demonstrates the applicability of our approach in the spatial distribution of frozen ground temperature and shows that the approach can be used for analysis and prediction. This study offers insight into temperature monitoring of frozen ground, which helps prevent regional geological disasters.

Risk assessment for oil leakage under the common threat of multiple natural hazards.

Petroleum industry can create enormous wealth and employment opportunities, which is one of the pillars of the national economy. The transportation conditions of petroleum products are complex and changeable. The natural disaster-induced dangerous chemical leakage may damage the ecological environment, which leads to substantial economic losses. It significantly undermines the sustainable development agenda. Therefore, assessing the possibility of leakage and the potential environmental damages becomes a primary task to decision-makers to formulate maintenance plans. This paper evaluated the risk of an oil pipeline leakage under the regional geological disasters. Specifically, risk assessment indicators system was established considering the common threat of multiple natural hazards in the region. The sensitivities of the influence factors were determined using the combined GIS and the contribution rate model. The fuzzy analysis approach was used to process the expert's judgment to obtain a real-time disaster hazard. Meanwhile, in terms of the analysis of pipeline failure causes, the assessment system of disaster resistance ability was developed to determine the possibility of leakage. The leakage-induced environmental losses were quantified by monetary quantification. Finally, the level of environmental risk was determined using a 5 × 5 probability-currency matrix. Case results show that the risk level is medium, thereby appropriate maintenance measures need to be taken to reduce the risk. Overall, this study provides necessary help to prevent the leakage of petroleum products in transportation. Also, the environmental risk presented in the form of currency can promote non-environmental professional risk decision-makers better understand the degree of risk.

A method for the hazard assessment of regional geological disasters: a case study of the Panxi area, China

ABSTRACT A novel geological hazard assessment model was developed by integrating an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a projection pursuit model (PPM) in this study. Remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) techniques were also coupled and the hazard risk of the Panxi area in western China was assessed to test the model feasibility. The results show the model coupled with the GIS technique not only enables regional geological hazard risk assessment but also quantitatively visualizes its spatial distribution; and the model is ideally suitable for regional geological hazard risk assessment because it fully considers the subjective and objective factors.

Risk Identification of Seismic Landslides by Joint Newmark and RockFall Analyst Models: A Case Study of Roads Affected by the Jiuzhaigou Earthquake

Geological disasters are a great threat to people’s lives and property. At present, it is difficult to evaluate quantitatively the cascading effects of regional geological disasters, and the development of new methods for such evaluation is much needed. In this study, the authors have developed a joint procedure that couples the Newmark model and the RockFall Analyst model based on a GIS platform in order to identify the impact of seismic landslides on roads. The new method effectively combines two processes—seismic landslide occurrence probability analysis and mass movement trajectory simulation. The permanent displacement derived from the Newmark model is used to identify potential source areas of landslides. Based on the RockFall Analyst model, the possible impact of mass movement on the roads can be simulated. To verify the reliability of the method, the landslides induced by the 2017 Jiuzhaigou Earthquake were taken as a case study. The results suggest that about 21.37% of the study area is at high risk of seismic landslides, and approximately 3.95 km of road sections are at extremely high risk of large landslides. The simulated area is consistent with the distribution of disasters revealed by post-earthquake remote sensing image interpretation and field investigation in existing studies. This indicates that the procedure, which joins the Newmark and RockFall models, has a high reliability for risk identification and can be applied to seismic landslide risk assessment and prediction in similar areas.

The Integration Processing Method of the Ground Fissures Geospatial Data

The disaster of ground fissures is a kind of extremely destructive and regional geological disaster. The characteristics of the ground fissures spatial data is multi-source, heterogeneous and big data. This paper put forward the key integration method of the ground fissures spatial data. It can not only improve the accuracy, timeliness and scientificity of multi-source and heterogeneous ground fissures information query and acquisition, but also can better share and overall management of the ground fissures data.

Study on Geological Disaster Susceptibility in Nanyang and Xiangyang Basin

Nanyang and Xiangyang Basin is located in the east of Qinling Mountains and Daba Mountain, and the west of Dabie Mountain and Tongbai Mountain. Its north is the Funiu Mountain seated at the east end of Qinling Mountain, and the south is the east end of the Daba Mountains. The main geological environment problems in the area include collapse, landslides, ground fissure, high fluorine water, expansive soil etc. On the basis of collecting the data of geological environment in the basin area, the article regards Nanyang and Xiangyang Basin area and its surrounding area as research objects, and then builds the geological environment database of the study area through GIS platform. Based on the analysis of the factors that affect the geological disasters susceptibility in the study area, an evaluation index system of geological disaster susceptibility was established. The paper expounds the process and steps of applying analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to geological disaster susceptibility assessment, and uses this method (AHP) to establish the hierarchical analysis structural model and the judgment matrix of geological disaster susceptibility comprehensive evaluation, so as to determine the influence of geological disasters. The weight of degree factors establishes a mathematical model for the evaluation of susceptibility to catastrophic disasters in geological disasters and comprehensive evaluation of susceptibility to geology in regional geological disasters. Through using the evaluation module developed by MapGIS, the geological disaster susceptibility of the study area can be divided, and there are four zones: highly-prone area, mid-prone areas, low-prone areas, undeveloped area. This article analyzes the causes of geological disaster susceptibility in the study area, and the research results can provide the basis for geological environment management, planning and disaster prevention and reduction in the study area. At the same time, the reliability of the evaluation results is discussed by comparing the evaluation results with actual geological disasters.

Constructing ecological security patterns in mountain areas based on geological disaster sensitivity: A case study in Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, China.

As one of the key topics in the research of landscape ecology, regional ecological security patterns can effectively promote regional sustainable development and terrestrial ecological barriers construction. It is extremely important for middle Yunnan, with frequent disasters and fragile ecolo-gical environment, to construct ecological security patterns so as to effectively avoid the geological disasters, maintain ecosystem health, and promote the coordinated development of regional ecological system and social economic system. Taking Yuxi City as a case study area, this study firstly estimated the ecosystem services importance of water conservation, carbon fixation and oxygen release, soil conservation, and biodiversity according to the basal characteristics of regional ecological environment, and then identified ecological sources in consideration of the quality of integrated ecosystem services and single types. Secondly, the resistance surface based on land use types was modified by the sensitivity of regional geological disasters. Lastly, the ecological corridors were identified using minimum cumulative resistance model, and as a result, the ecological security pattern of Yuxi City was constructed. The results showed that there were 81 patches for ecological sources in Yuxi City, accounting for 38.4% of the total area, and overlaying 75.2% of nature protection areas. The ecological sources were mainly distributed in the western mountainous areas as well as eastern water areas of the city. The length of ecological corridors was 1642.04 km, presenting a spatial pattern of one vertical and three horizontals, and extending along river valleys and fault basins with high vegetation coverage. This paper constructed ecological security patterns in mountainous areas aiming at the characteristics of geological disasters, providing spatial guidance for development and conservation decision-making in mountain areas.

Digital Management Mechanism of Sudden Geological Disaster Emergency Plan

Digital emergency plan is an important part of the emergency platform. This paper proceeds as follow. Firstly, it presents the key technologies of digital emergency plan, emphasizing feature extraction, multi-source information fusion and GIS technology. And then the processes of the geological disaster emergency plan are discussed based on the “The national sudden geological disaster emergency plan” for guideline, including regional geological disaster warning information response process and single geological disaster emergency response information flow, . Moreover, the digital prototype system is designed, including the framework of geological disaster emergency plan of the overall structure, database and function modules. Finally, based on MapGIS platform, B/S mode, using Flex, Flash Builder technology, it developed the prototype system for experiment.

Assessment of Regional Geological Disaster on Grey Clustering Methed in Shulan

Gray clustering method was used to establish the regional geological disaster risk assessment model by factor of the mean annual rainfall, relative height, ground slope ，geomorphological type, rock and soil type, fracture density, earthquake intensity, vegetation cover rate, human activity. This model was used to Predictive assessment of geological disasters in the Jilin Shulan region which is divided into the Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ districts according to the disaster assessment level. The Comparison of the model predicted disaster area and the actual geological disaster areas was correlation (accuracy) of 75% or more. The study confirms that the gray clustering method to predict geological disasters is effective to reduce the loss of geological disasters and to prevent geological disasters.