Landslide Investigation Using Seismic Refraction Tomography Method: A Review

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, near-surface seismic refraction tomography (SRT) has been extensively used as a non-invasive and cost-effective geophysical method to characterize complex geological structures for landslide investigation. This geophysical technique is able to characterize the slope material, the sliding surface's geometry, the landslide mass movement, the physical properties of media, and the water saturation effects on the slope. Therefore, this method has become an appropriate method due to the increasing progress of novel algorithms and the improvements of field-data collection systems. In this paper, we attempt to review the essential research that investigated various types of landslides influenced by water saturation and landslide materials and identified in various areas, since the year 2000. Significant conclusions obtained by applying different survey strategies and data processing algorithms in seismic refraction surveys are widely discussed concentrating on the advantages and disadvantages of this method. The main results obtained by the few available studies applying time-lapse SRT (TLSRT) are particularly analyzed.