Bed Stability and Debris Flow Erosion: A Dynamic “Shields Criterion” Associated with Bed Structure

Abstract:

Debris flows are mass movements that play an important role in transporting sediment from steep uplands to rivers at lower slopes. As the debris flow moves downstream, it entrains materials such as loose boulders, gravel, sand and mud deposited locally by shorter flows such as slides and rockfalls. To capture the conditions under which debris flows entrain bed sediment, some models use something akin to the Shields’ criterion and an excess shear stress of the flow. However, these models typically neglect granular-scale effects in the bed which can modify the conditions under which a debris flow is erosional or depositional. For example, it is well known that repeated shearing causes denser packing in loose dry soils, which undoubtedly changes their resistance to shear. Here, we present laboratory flume experiments showing that the conditions for entrainment by debris flows is significantly dependent on the aging of an erodible bed even for narrowly distributed spherical particles. We investigate this quantitatively using particle tracking measurements to quantify instantaneous erosion rates and the evolving bed structure or “fabric”. With progressive experiments we find a signature that emerges in the bed fabric that is correlated with an increasing apparent “fragility” of the bed. Specifically, a system that is originally depositional may become erosional after repeated debris flow events, and an erodible bed becomes increasingly erodible with repeated flows. We hypothesize that related effects of bed aging at the field scale may be partly responsible for the increasing destructiveness of secondary flows of landslides and debris flows.