Risk considerations of cave stability in soft carbonate rocks using 3D geophysical methods

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Abstract

According to the Protection Civil Department database, Apulia is the fourth region in Italy affected bysinkholes, due to collapse of natural or mane-made cavities. The southern part of the region (the Salento peninsula)had hosted in the last twenty years at least fifteen events of sinkholes, the greatest part of which occurred inside"soft" carbonate rocks (calcarenites).The man - made and/or natural cavities are sometime assets of historical and archaeological significance. Sometimemonuments of historical and archaeological significance are located in areas with high risk of sinkholes. In spite of theimportance on the civil protection, the prediction of the sinkhole events is currently an hard issue. This paper providea new methodological approach on the evaluation of sinkhole hazard in such "soft" carbonate rocks combinggeophysical and mine engineering complementary methods.A case study is exposed which concern natural cavity named "Grotta delle Veneri". In this case the approach was: i)3D Ground-penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) in order to evidence the shape anddimension of karstic cave; ii) seismic refraction tomography in order to study the physical-mechanical characteristic ofrock mass that constitute the roof of the cave; iii) the scaled span empirical analysis to instability evaluation of thecrown pillar's caves.The research allows to define the geometrical cave shape (span, length and thickness of the cave's roof) whichrelated to the geological features and physics properties of the rocks, determine the instability of the roof's cave and,as a consequence, the sinkhole hazard.

Autore Pugliese

Tutti gli autori

  • Leucci G.

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Non Disponibile

Anno di pubblicazione

2012

ISSN

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ISBN

978-1-61804-137-1

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