More swoopy

[speculumannorum]

6.8.20 - another view of the swoopy peak, which appears to be called Sägisen, with the Winteregg behind it (Egg being, I discovered, Swiss German for ridge).

Comments

[reynardo]

Why the vertical rocks? As far as I can tell, this is on the edge of the thrust zone. Sounds dirty, doesn't it? Basically, the part of Europe we call Italy is moving north at about 3mm a year. (This is *very* slow. Just to the west, Morocco is moving towards Spain at 2cm per year. But when you've got two huge blocks moving together like Italy and France/Switzerland, things slow down a lot).

When they crashed together, the tea between them became crushed and squashed and piled up into the Alps. It looks like this particular section is right on the thrust zone - to the left, the marine rocks are squashed and deformed to make the vertical folds. To the right, the overthrust of the Italian rocks have remained fairly horizontal with little deformation.

This video does a fairly good job of explaining it, and this one is lots of words on the slides, but fairly accurate too.

And this demonstration explains it very well. The whole set of videos in this series about "Deep Time" are wonderful catnip for me (and not just because of the Scots accent) but the box of strata and the compression really show how the folding occurs.

Enjoy!