Seismic Refraction Applied to Weathering Thickness Characterization and Slope Stability in NW Portugal

In the past decades urban areas have suffered large demographic pressures, forcing people and their housing compounds to migrate to peripheral regions were they often build without land planning concerns, and where many times they are subject to adverse natural conditions and exposed to natural hazards being landslides one of the main threats. Nowadays, geophysical methods assume a relevant role monitoring and surveying unstable slopes. We performed thirty seismic profiles with the aim of determine distribution of rock weathering through seismic refraction techniques, in Canelas, a small village in NW Portugal. Each profile was summarized with average values of velocity for each depth. Despite having a low density coverage for the area involved, the results seem to show that seismic refraction is an important tool to rapidly characterize weathering thicknesses, a very important factor to be taken into account in problems of slope stability.