Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
Mudurnu is a county of Bolu Province, in Turkey, that was historically located on major trade routes (i.e., the Silk Road and the Crimean Road) and served as a trading town and military base in the Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman periods. Mudurnu County is affected by regional rock slope instabilities that create an important hazard and pose significant risk to human life, houses, buildings, and industrial facilities because of their high exposure. Slope instabilities also pose a danger to historically valuable structures that have made Mudurnu a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List. The purpose of this study is to assess the stability of rock slopes under static and dynamic conditions employing a probabilistic approach, with a focus on the western side of the valley. The engineering geological and geomechanical properties of the region were obtained through a 3D point cloud generated by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and scan-line surveys. The western side of the Mudurnu Valley was divided into 11 geomechanically uniform sectors, all prone to planar, wedge, and toppling failures. Considering the proximity of Mudurnu County to the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ), dynamic analyses performed using the Newmark sliding block method based on the Mw 7.2 Düzce earthquake records concluded that large earthquakes with high spectral acceleration values are expected to pose a significant risk of rock slope failure in Mudurnu. Stability analyses showed that Sector 8 is the most critical in terms of complex failures.