Landslide investigation using seismic refraction tomography method: A review

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, the near-surface seismic refraction method has been extensively used as a non-invasive and cost-effective geophysical method to characterize geological structures for landslide investigation. Seismic refraction tomography (SRT) is considered a modern interpreting seismic refraction data that allows for determining lateral variations of P-wave velocity. This geophysical technique can 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. This paper reviews the essential research investigating various types of landslides influenced by water saturation and landslide materials and identified in various areas since 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 time-lapse SRT (TLSRT) are mainly analyzed.