Identification and Analysis of Unstable Slope and Seasonal Frozen Soil Area along the Litang Section of the Sichuan–Tibet Railway, China

Abstract

The Sichuan–Tibet Railway (STR) is currently under construction and serves as an important transportation route in western China. Identifying potential geohazards along the route is important for project construction. However, research on the frozen soil of the Western Sichuan Plateau, and on frozen soil identification using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is relatively negligible. As a low-cost, all-weather spatial geodesy tool, InSAR is frequently used for geohazard identification. We selected a study area located along the Litang section of the STR, starting from Litang County in the east and extending 60 km to the west. The geological conditions along the line are complex, with numerous fault zones and hidden danger points for landslide. To identify unstable slopes along the line, distribute scatterer InSAR (DS-InSAR) was used to obtain surface displacement information from 2018 to 2021. Based on the displacement information obtained from the ascending and descending orbit images from Sentinel-1, a spatial density clustering method identified 377 and 388 unstable slopes in the study area, respectively, of these, 132 were consistent. The identified unstable slopes were mostly located in areas with a relatively high altitude and moderate slope. The Luanshibao landslide, which is a typical landslide in the study area, had notable signs of displacement, where the displacement rate along the back edge of the landslide can reach 20 mm/a. An inversion method for the seasonal frozen soil area distribution was proposed based on the periodic subsidence and uplift model and time-series monitoring data; the calculated seasonal freeze–thaw amplitude exceeded 20 mm. Further analysis revealed a 2-month lag in the response of the freeze–thaw phenomenon to the air temperature. This study demonstrated that DS-InSAR offers optimal surface displacement data, which can provide an important basis to identify engineering geological hazards.