Feasibility of Seismic Monitoring for Repeated Rock Slope Failures

Seismic monitoring is an emergent technique for monitoring rock slope failures along highways; however, a high-level ambient noise interferes with recognizing failure signals. We used two seismic stations near the Guanyung rock slope failure to address the issues. The result indicated that the ambient noise almost dominated the frequency band from 3Hz to 80Hz. Only the signals below 3 Hz were clear to the rock slope failure. Furthermore, the spectrogram of the event showed the V-shape feature, which implied that the physical process of the failure was detaching from a slope, propagating along the slope, impacting the road, and gradually depositing. The feature support that even under the high-level ambient noise environment, seismic monitoring can apply to rock slope monitoring.