Overtopping and flood routing process of landslide dams consisted of ice-soil mixtures: A preliminary study

With global warming, glacial collapse chain disasters have frequently occurred in high-mountain areas. In particular, the ice avalanche-glacial debris flow/landslide-barrier lake-flood burst chain disaster caused the most serious consequences. Different from the general landslide dam consisted of rocks and soils, the landslide dam initiated by ice avalanches contains a considerable amount of ice. The appearance of ice will influence the overall performance of the landslide dam by melting, which may cause differential settlements, local weak zones, a more porous structure, and a lower erosion resistance of the landslide dam. Such changes in the erodibility and geometry of the landslide dam will further affect the dam overtopping and flood routing process, which have not been investigated yet and urgently require further study. Therefore, in this study, a preliminary study of the effects of different ice fractions of the landslide dam is conducted, which mainly involves changes in the dam erodibility, the dam geometry, the overtopping development, the final breach size, the process of downstream flood routing, etc. Results show that with the increasing amount of ice melting, the coefficient of soil erodibility and the soil void ratio increase significantly, implying a more erodible dam material and a looser dam structure. The melting of ice can also induce obvious dam settlement, which further results in an earlier dam burst and a shorter rescue time. With the increasing initial ice amount in the landslide dam, the overtopping process develops more rapidly, the breach expands greater both horizontally and vertically, the subsequent flood becomes larger, and the peak arrival time comes earlier.

Automated summary

With the increasing impacts of global warming, glacier collapse chain disasters have been frequently occurring in high-mountain areas. The consequences of the ice avalanche-glacial debris flow/landslide-barrier lake-flood burst chain disaster are particularly severe. Studies have shown that as the amount of ice melting increases, the dam material becomes more erodible and the structure becomes looser, leading to faster dam breach, larger floods, and earlier peak arrival times.