With the developing trend of long, large and deep construction characteristics for underground engineering, larger water inrush disaster becomes the bottleneck problem for the further development of underground engineering. Based on an extensive literature review, the status and developing trend of the water inrush mechanism and countermeasures were summarized in detail, such as catastrophe condition and evolution characteristics of water inrush, formation mechanism of water inrush passage, and infestation regularity and mutation mechanism of seepage flow, based on which, a new academic idea has been proposed that artificial disturbance of excavation and disturbance of karst water and its pressure leads to water inrush of relatively intact rock masses, and the polyphyletic dynamic information of seepage mechanics for geological defects is the key for the catastrophe evolution description of geological defects. Based on example analysis and numerical simulations, two aspects must be further studied, which are the microcosmic effect mechanism of the water inrush passage formation and macroscopic instability criterion for the system of water bearing structure considering the effect of geological factors and engineering effort factor, and the geophysical method effectiveness for the water bearing structure diction can be improved by combining with the monitoring method of polyphyletic information for water inrush prediction, which will lay a theoretical basis for the groundwater inrush prediction in underground engineering.
