Abstract:
The Loess Plateau with an area of about 640,000 km
2 has experienced and is experiencing the severe geological hazards due to the complex natural condition and intensive human activities,threatening the safety of people's lives and property. It is urgent to detect and monitor the potential geological hazards in the Loess Plateau with purpose of preventing and mitigating the disasters. However,the existed studies focused on the isolated disaster investigation over the small-scale region,and there was a lack of multi disasters investigations over the whole Loess Plateau. In this context,we used the SBAS-InSAR technology to process 1994 Sentinel-1A images,and obtained the annual deformation rate and time series deformation spanning from January 1,2019 to March 31,2021 over the whole Loess Plateau. Then,we employed the hot spot analysis technology to extract the effective deformation area. On this basis,with the help of optical images and manual visual interpretation,a total of 3240 potential geological hazards in the Loess Plateau were identified,including 1920 mining sinkholes,593 subsiding regions and 727 landslides. After that,we analyzed the spatial distribution laws and causes of detected geological hazards,and concluded that the mining sinkholes distribute along the regions with rich coal resources,and had a good consistency with the lithology of the stratum. The subsiding regions mainly concentrates in the cities,where the over-exploitation of groundwater and intensive human activities were conducted in the last few decades. For the landslides,they are correlated with the stratigraphic lithology,human activities and rivers. The results show that the detected landslides are located in the elevation of 1500~3000 m,the slope of 10°~30°,and the slope aspect of the north,northeast,east and southeast directions.