Zhuo Chen
Danqing Song
Hongquan Song
Zizheng Guo
Mukhiddin Juliev
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- 1College of Civil Engineering, Sichuan Agricultural University, Dujiangyan, Sichuan, China
- 2Sichuan Higher Education Engineering Research Center for Disaster Prevention and Mitigation of Village Construction, Sichuan Agricultural University, Dujiangyan, China
- 3School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
- 4State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
- 5Laboratory of Geospatial Technology for the Middle and Lower Yellow River Regions, Ministry of Education (Henan University), Kaifeng, China
- 6Henan Key Laboratory of Integrated Air Pollution Control and Ecological Security, Henan University, Kaifeng, China
- 7School of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China
- 8Department of Ecology and Water Resources Management, Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers, Tashkent Polytechnic University in Tashkent, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Editorial on the Research Topic
Large landslides in Sichuan-Tibet railway: Recognition, mechanism, and mitigation
The geological environment along the Sichuan–Tibet Railway is extremely complex. The terrain is steep, and the neotectonic movement is strong. This region is prone to moderate and strong earthquakes and has been called the “forbidden zone” for railway construction by scholars around the world. The Sichuan–Tibet Railway passes through the high mountains and valleys on the eastern edge of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, where large landslides frequently occur (Song et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2021; Yao et al., 2022). These landslides may not only cause significant casualties and property losses but also seriously affect road planning and construction. Affected by plate tectonic movement and the extreme climate, active faults develop in the region, strong earthquakes occur frequently, freeze–thaw and dry–wet cycles are strong, and the formation mechanism of large landslides is complex, making it difficult to effectively prevent and control the risk of large landslides. Therefore, it is one of the greatest scientific challenges for the Sichuan–Tibet Railway to improve the scientific understanding of the evolution process of large landslides while considering the internal and external dynamic coupling effects.
This Research Topic aimed at widening the knowledge on the large landslides by emphasizing interdisciplinary contributions. This Research Topic currently includes five papers, which come from many fields, such as engineering geology, geotechnical engineering, geomorphology, engineering materials, and image processing. Through field investigation and numerical simulation, Wang et al. investigated the causes of debris flow on the slope of the Erlang Mountain Tunnel Management Office. The dynamic process of the debris flow can be divided into four stages, and the slope shrinkage significantly magnifies the discharge and velocity of the debris flow. In addition, the risk level map provides a reference value for the assessment and prediction of the debris flow. To improve the image processing efficiency of the rock failure area, combined with regional growth segmentation, adaptive threshold segmentation, and global threshold segmentation, Yuan et al. proposed a batch automatic recognition method. The results show that this method can automatically identify many rock cracks and keep the identification accuracy and time in a controllable range. Bi et al. studied the effects of initial water content, soil type, dry density, and desalination on the soil freezing characteristic curve during a freezing–thawing process. The experimental results show that initial water content, desalination, and soil type have great impacts on the soil freezing characteristic curve, while dry density has an insignificant effect on it. In addition to the above articles, the two other articles (Han et al.; Zhang et al.) provided some novel information of other aspects of the large landslides in the Sichuan–Tibet Railway area.
The Sichuan–Tibet Railway area represents a natural laboratory for the study of landslide hazards caused by internal and external dynamic coupling. Landslide disaster mechanisms have been observed on different scales, namely, on the regional, slope, and soil scales. However, integrating and proving the contribution of these mechanisms are still a challenge. Overall, the articles presented in this Research Topic, “Large Landslides on the Sichuan–Tibet Railway: Recognition, Mechanism, and Mitigation,” provide a valuable source of information concerning the formation causes of large landslides in the Sichuan–Tibet Railway area. We would like to thank all the authors and reviewers who have contributed to this Research Topic, which is not easy but non-etheless interesting and challenging. We hope that this Research Topic can inspire new research methods in the field of landslide disasters in the future.
Author contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Funding
This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52208359 and 52109125), the Open Research Fund of SINOPEC Key Laboratory of Geophysics (WX 2021-01-12), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M680583), and the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talent of China (BX20200191).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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References
Chen, Z., Zhou, H., Ye, F., Liu, B., and Fu, W. (2021). The characteristics, induced factors, and formation mechanism of the 2018 Baige landslide in Jinsha River, Southwest China. Catena 203, 105337. doi:10.1016/j.catena.2021.105337
Song, D., Chen, Z., Ke, Y., and Nie, W., 2020. Seismic response analysis of a bedding rock slope based on the time-frequency joint analysis method: A case study from the middle reach of the jinsha river, China. Eng. Geol. 274, 105731, doi:10.1016/j.enggeo.2020.105731
Keywords: Sichuan-Tibet railway, large landslides, early identification, formation mechanism, numerical modeling, laboratory experiments
Citation: Chen Z, Song D, Song H, Guo Z and Juliev M (2023) Editorial: Large landslides in the Sichuan–Tibet railway: Recognition, mechanism, and mitigation. Front. Earth Sci. 11:1170789. doi: 10.3389/feart.2023.1170789
Received: 21 February 2023; Accepted: 09 March 2023;
Published: 14 March 2023.
Edited and reviewed by:
Chong Xu, Ministry of Emergency Management, ChinaCopyright © 2023 Chen, Song, Song, Guo and Juliev. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Zhuo Chen, MTM4ODI1MzUwMDlAMTYzLmNvbQ==; Danqing Song, ZGFucWluZ3NvbmdsenVAMTYzLmNvbQ==