Monitoring system warns of slippery slopes
Thursday, April 7, 2011 - 10:30
in Earth & Climate
Doren in the Austrian Bregenzerwald, February 2007: a slope 650 meters long breaks, resulting in a massive slide into the valley below. The nearest residential buildings are very close to the 70-meter-high rim. This barely avoided catastrophe is not the only incident. Geologists have been monitoring increasingly unstable masses of earth over the past few years in the Alps and other Alpine regions, which have slipped down slopes and on slid unchecked down valleys to more stable substrates. The scientists are primarily looking at heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused by climatie change, which in turn has caused the substrate to soften and has increased the weight on it.
