Thierry Oppikofer
Director: Prof. Michel Jaboyedoff
Jury: Prof. Jean-Luc Epard, Prof. Torsten Vennemann, Dr. Marc-Henri Derron, Prof. Giovanni Crosta, Prof. Doug Stead, Dr. Lars Harald Blikra
Slope movements, such as rockfalls, rockslides, shallow landslides or debris flows, are frequent in many mountainous areas. These natural hazards endanger the inhabitants and infrastructures making necessary to assess the hazard and risk caused by these phenomena. This PhD thesis explores various approaches using digital elevation models (DEMs) – and particularly high-resolution DEMs created by aerial or terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) – that contribute to the assessment of slope movement hazard at regional and local scales.
The regional detection of areas prone to rockfalls and large rockslides uses different morphologic criteria or geometric instability factors derived from DEMs, i.e. the steepness of the slope, the presence of discontinuities that enable a sliding mechanism and the denudation potential. The combination of these factors leads to a map of susceptibility to rockfall initiation that is in good agreement with field studies as shown with the example of the Little Mill Campground area (Utah, USA). Another case study in the Illgraben catchment in the Swiss Alps highlighted the link between areas with a high denudation potential and actual rockfall areas.
Techniques for a detailed analysis and characterization of slope movements based on high-resolution DEMs have been developed for specific, localized sites, i.e. ancient slide scars, present active instabilities or potential slope instabilities. The analysis of the site’s characteristics mainly focuses on rock slopes and includes structural analyses (orientation of discontinuities); estimation of spacing, persistence and roughness of discontinuities; failure mechanisms based on the structural setting; and volume calculations. For the volume estimation a new 3D approach was tested to reconstruct the topography before a landslide or to construct the basal failure surface of an active or potential instability. The rockslides at Åknes, Tafjord and Rundefjellet in western Norway were principally used as study sites to develop and test the different techniques.
The monitoring of slope instabilities investigated in this PhD thesis is essentially based on multi-temporal (or sequential) high-resolution DEMs, in particular sequential point clouds acquired by TLS. The changes in the topography due to slope movements can be detected and quantified by sequential TLS datasets, notably by shortest distance comparisons revealing the 3D slope movements over the entire region of interest. A detailed analysis of rock slope movements is based on the affine transformation between an initial and a final state of the rock mass and its decomposition into translational and rotational movements. Monitoring using TLS was very successful on the fast-moving Eiger rockslide in the Swiss Alps, but also on the active rockslides of Åknes and Nordnesfjellet (northern Norway). One of the main achievements on the Eiger and Åknes rockslides is to combine the site’s morphology and structural setting with the measured slope movements to coherent instability models. Both case studies also highlighted a strong control of the structures in the rock mass on the sliding directions. TLS was also used to monitor slope movements in soils, such as landslides in sensitive clays in Québec (Canada), shallow landslides on river banks (Sorge River, Switzerland) and a debris flow channel (Illgraben).
The PhD thesis underlines the broad uses of high-resolution DEMs and especially of TLS in the detection, analysis and monitoring of slope movements. Future studies should explore more in depth the different techniques and approaches developed and used in this PhD, improve them and better integrate the findings in current hazard assessment practices and in slope stability models.
