Dolomites declared World Natural Heritage

The Three Peaks, the Catinaccio and the Geisler Peaks – the steep rock formations of the Dolomites rise mightily above the otherwise gently undulating landscape. Because of their “unique monumental beauty”, the Dolomites have now been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Their peaks rise into the sky like pointed teeth. Whoever visits the Dolomites walks over ancient coral reefs and scrambles right through the history of the earth. Like the entire Alps, the Dolomites began to rise and fold up from the seabed millions of years ago. Over time, wind and weather formed gentle slopes at the foot of their peaks. Today, cows graze here in summer.

Every year, thousands of tourists come to marvel at the fabulous landscape. Extreme climbers perform circus-like feats on the steep walls. The fairytale scenery attracts not only hikers and mountaineers, but also celebrities: Hollywood stars like George Clooney and Tom Cruise have already descended here. And Reinhold Messner, himself born in Brixen, began his career as an extreme climber on the walls of the Dolomites.

The World Heritage Committee was also impressed by the grandiose nature: on 26 June, parts of the Dolomites were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. This means that from now on the Dolomites are under special protection.

How the “pale mountains” became the Dolomites

The Dolomites are also called “pale mountains” because of their colour. The Ladins, the oldest inhabitants of the area, tell many stories about their mysterious mountains: there is talk of the dwarf king Laurin and his enchanted rose garden and of a dwarf people who have spun the peaks with threads of moonlight. This mountain landscape has always inspired the imagination.

The French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, on the other hand, took a more sober view of its light-coloured rock. On closer examination, he found out that they did not consist of pure limestone, as had been assumed. The salt magnesium oxide also had a large share. The newly discovered rock of the mountain range was named after its discoverer Dolomieu: the dolomite. And the “pale mountains” turned – simsalabim – into the Dolomites.

Carved in stone – landscapes made of sedimentary rock

Like the layers of a cake, different sedimentary rocks can lie on top of each other. If the subsoil beneath the layers rises, they are tilted. If earth plates collide, they are compressed and unfolded, as in the Alps. Weathering and erosion gnaw away at these sedimentary layers over millions of years. Depending on the hardness of the sediment, the forces of water, cold and wind leave their mark and carve impressive landscapes into the rock.

A famous example of this is the Grand Canyon in Arizona: here the Colorado River has carved a channel through different layers of rock. It is easy to see how soft and harder rock alternate: The soft rock gives way quickly, creating sloping hillsides, while the harder rock remains standing and forms steep, almost vertical walls. Like a staircase, these sedimentary steps lead down to today’s river course and offer the visitor a spectacular sight.

Sedimentary strata also formed a well-known large landscape in Germany: the Southwest German stratified plain, which stretches from Baden-Württemberg through Hesse and Bavaria to Thuringia. After the Upper Rhine Graben collapsed, the sedimentary layers here became inclined. Depending on the hardness of the rock, the individual layers were eroded to varying degrees. Hard limestones formed steep steps, while soft, clayey layers were more eroded and today make up the landscape as gentle slopes and wide stepped areas. On the left side of the Rhine, this landscape is – almost as if mirror-inverted – opposite the North French Stepped Lands.

Sedimentary rocks

The “stripe design” is already created during the formation of the rock. The starting material is weathering debris that is carried away by water or wind. Rivers, glaciers and dust storms lose their power at some point: river courses slow down towards their mouths and eventually flow into the sea or a lake. Glaciers advance into warmer regions and melt. Dust storms also weaken at some point. Then they can no longer carry dust, sand and debris. The crushed rock that is dragged along settles. Over time, the deposited material forms an ever higher layer – the sediment. Especially on the seabed and on the bottom of lakes, where rivers wash up a lot of material, such sediments accumulate, including remains of dead animals or calcareous shells.

Gradually, different sediments are layered on top of each other. One layer may consist of sandstone, for example: In dry times, the wind has blown desert sand onto it. When the sea level rises again, this layer is covered by water: calcareous shells of marine animals sink to the seabed and deposit another layer on top of the sand. Over millions of years, the climate changed again and again, causing the sea level to fluctuate. This allowed different layers to be deposited.

Over time, the sediment cover becomes thicker and thicker. Under the weight of their own weight, the initially loose sediments are compressed more and more, small cavities disappear, the mass thickens. Further layers are deposited on top, the sediment becomes increasingly solid and finally, under pressure, sedimentary rock. In geology, this process is also called diagenesis. If, for example, the shells of tiny marine animals are pressed into stone, limestone is formed. Fine grains of quartz sand cement together under high pressure to form sandstone.

In addition to debris, dead animals, for example fish, also settle on the seabed. Sealed airtight, their bones and scales were preserved and fossilised. Such fossils have immortalised themselves in the stone. Even after millions of years, they reveal a lot about the time when the sediment was formed. This is why geologists can read the rock layers like a history book.

Normally, only the top layer is visible to us. However, when a river digs through the sedimentary rock, it is lifted during mountain building or blasted free in a quarry, we get a view of the cross-section. The individual sediment layers are then clearly visible as “stripes” or bands in the rock.

How do mussels and corals get into the Alps?

The Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, is nothing other than a fossilised reef. If you climb it, you walk over ancient coral remains. Fossils like fossilised giant clams and ammonites can be found on the Dachstein in Austria or in the Dolomites. But: How did these remains of sea creatures get up to the highest peaks of the Alps?

Today’s Alps have risen from a shallow sea, the Tethys Sea. About 200 million years ago, this sea advanced northwards and covered parts of southern Germany. At that time, the climate here was tropical, much warmer than it is now. Today, the area would probably be a holiday paradise like the Maldives. At that time, however, no people lived here. Instead, the warm seawater was home to fish dinosaurs, shells, ammonites and corals. Their shells and carapaces were made of limestone and were deposited on the seabed after their death. Together with eroded rock debris, they formed a layer that became thicker and thicker over millions of years. Heat and pressure pressed the mighty limestone layers into solid sedimentary rock.

About a hundred million years ago, the African Plate began to move northwards. In the process, it pushed violently on the Eurasian Plate. This force caused the sea floor to unfold and be pushed higher and higher. From the bottom of the sea, the Alps gradually rose until they finally towered thousands of metres above the surrounding area. The reef remains and limestone layers from the sea floor became the Northern and Southern Limestone Alps. In the north they build up the Wetterstein limestone of the Zugspitze or the Dachstein limestone in Austria. In the Southern Limestone Alps, the steep cliffs of the Dolomites consist of ancient reefs. There, mountaineers and fossil hunters can still find countless ammonites and other fossilised sea creatures in the limestone. The Central Alps, on the other hand, consist of granite – a result of plate collision.

From bone to stone: fossils

What we know about life in times long past is largely due to fossilised remains of living beings: fossils. Such fossils are formed when plants or animals are buried under layers of sediment after their death. The soft parts of the living beings decompose, while hard parts, such as teeth, bones or shells, remain. When mighty layers of rock weigh down on these remains, they are slowly pressed into rock under the growing pressure.

As a rule, the younger fossils are found in the upper rock layer. The deeper you go into the sedimentary layers, the older the fossils that are stored there. Very old, but still frequently found fossils are, for example, the ammonites. These are the remains of shellfish that lived hundreds of millions of years ago and became extinct about 65 million years ago. Because they only lived for a limited period of time, this can roughly determine the age of the rock in which they were found.

To discover a fossil, you don’t necessarily have to drill deep into the earth. When the rock layers rise over millions of years, deeper layers are also pushed upwards and exposed by erosion. In this way, fossils from the lowest layers of the seabed, as is the case in the limestone Alps, can reach high mountain peaks.

But not only in rock, also in the resin of trees plants and animals, such as mosquitoes or beetles, are caught. Over a long period of time, the sticky tree resin turns into solid amber. In this yellowish-transparent rock, insects or plants that lived millions of years ago can still be seen very clearly today.

Folded and reshaped – the formation of the Alps

Every year, Munich and Venice come half a centimetre closer. That’s not much, but it is measurable. The fact that the German and Italian cities are very slowly moving closer together has to do with the formation of the Alps.

Compared to other mountains, the Alps are relatively young. Their history “only” began around 250 million years ago when a shallow sea formed between the continents of Eurasia and Africa: the Tethys. Rock debris and remains of living creatures settle on the seabed over a long period of time and become limestone.

About 100 million years ago, the African plate set off on its journey: It drifted northwards and pushed hard against the Eurasian continent. The pressure compresses the rock, causing it to fold up in waves. The individual folds can be as small as a few millimetres or as large as hundreds of metres. In some places, the folded layers push over each other like roof tiles and form so-called rock ceilings. Finally, magma also rises; namely at the moment when the African plate dives under the Eurasian plate. The rock is melted in the earth’s interior and rises upwards, but still cools below the earth’s surface. For this reason, the Central Alps consist, among other things, of the magmatic rock granite – in contrast to the limestone of the Northern and Southern Alps.

The folded area eventually rises above sea level under the great pressure. At first, the folded ridges still appear as elongated islands in the sea. But the archipelago is pushed further upwards and slowly rises to form a high mountain range into which the rivers cut deep valleys. Large amounts of erosion debris are piled up in the Alpine foreland. During the cold periods, huge glaciers carve deep trough valleys and steep mountain flanks into the rock. Only now does the typical high mountain landscape of the Alps form, which attracts us to hiking or climbing in summer and skiing in winter.

Until today, the African Plate is drifting northwards. That’s why the Alps are still being vigorously uplifted and compressed. This compression is the reason why Venice and the whole area beyond the Alps move a tiny bit closer to us every year.

Mountains on the move

Mighty and rigid mountains rise up into the sky. It seems as if nothing and no one can move them from the spot. But this is not true: mountains are constantly moving – but so slowly that we cannot see the change with the naked eye.

The reason for this: the plates of the earth’s crust move. And when two of these plates collide, the rock is compressed, pushed and piled up. Similar to a car accident, mountains fold up at the edges of the plates when they collide. Mountains and valleys are therefore a “crumple zone” of the colliding plates. However, this does not happen abruptly like in a car accident, but much more slowly than in slow motion. The result is folded mountains like the Andes in South America. There, the oceanic Nazca plate slides under the South American plate and squeezes the rock together with incredible force. In the process, the elongated mountains of the Andes pile up, stretching over a distance of 7500 kilometres. This makes the Andes the longest overground mountain range in the world.

However, there are also huge mountains below sea level. They run through the middle of the oceans. They, too, owe their existence to the moving plates. Where two plates move away from each other at the bottom of the ocean, magma from the mantle seeps through the oceanic crust. The hot rock cools on the seabed and piles up into mountains thousands of metres long: the mid-ocean ridges. Where the lava reaches sea level and rises above it, islands like Iceland are formed. These mountains, born in the sea, are the longest on earth. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs from north to south through the entire Antlantic – about 20,000 kilometres long.

Breathtaking: Mount Everest conquered without oxygen equipment!

No sensible person would have thought it possible: Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler have climbed the highest mountain on earth without oxygen equipment. Completely exhausted but happy, the two extreme mountaineers arrived at base camp yesterday.

Their summit attempt on Everest begins on 8 May, at half past five in the morning, after an icy night in the tent. They have been on their way up from base camp since 6 May. The warnings of many doctors do not scare them: they want to climb the roof of the world without artificial oxygen. One failed attempt is already behind them. They are now making another attempt from an altitude of almost 8,000 metres. The climb in the thin high-altitude air is an ordeal, every step is torture. But the two are in top shape, and they have experience.

At noon they reach an altitude of 8,800 metres. Their legs are heavy as lead, the fatigue hard to describe. But they overcome their pain and trudge on, as if in a trance. Finally they achieve the seemingly impossible: they stand on the summit of Everest. A world record! From exhaustion, they let themselves fall into the snow. After a long break, Messner takes his camera out of his backpack and films. Back in the tent, they radio the base camp: they have made it!

During the night Messner is tormented by terrible eye pain: he is snow-blind. Habeler is injured in the ankle. Nevertheless, on 10 May the two of them manage the descent to base camp. Only now do they realise their success, a sense of triumph fills them. The sensation is perfect: Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner have proved that Mount Everest can be climbed without oxygen equipment.

In the death zone

Doctors had warned Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler that moving around at 8,000 metres without artificial oxygen was extremely dangerous to one’s health. Brain cells could die and controlled thinking could cease, and there was also a risk of unconsciousness. “You will come back as idiots,” they said briefly and drastically.

In fact, altitude sickness is not to be trifled with. From about 2,000 metres, the thinning air can make itself felt through shortness of breath, dizziness, headaches or vomiting. With increasing altitude, the lungs absorb less and less oxygen, and the body is undersupplied. Above 7,000 metres – in the death zone – most people become unconscious if they do not receive supplementary oxygen. In the worst case, the extreme altitude leads to death. This fact has already cost many mountaineers their lives. The fact that Habeler and Messner climbed the summit without breathing apparatus really borders on a miracle. It can only be explained with the most precise planning, fabulous physical fitness and an iron will.