Melody of an Alpine summit falling apart

The entire summit of the 2592 meters high Hochvogel is sliced by a five meters wide and thirty meters long fracture. It continues to open up by up to half a centimeter per month. Throughout the years, the southern side of the mountain has already subsided by several meters; and at some point it will fail, releasing up to 260,000 cubic meters of limestone debris down into the Hornbach Valley in Austria. Such a volume would roughly correspond to 260 family houses. When this will happen is hard to predict by conventional methods. Researchers of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam—German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Technical University of Munich have approached this question by seismic sensors. The devices record the subtle vibration of the peak: similar to a violin string which is pulled more or less does the pitch of the summit change as it becomes stressed, an effect that allows unique insight to the preparation phase of an upcoming rock slide. Thus, also a timely warning should become possible—even if human dwellings are not threatened directly at this site. The study has recently been published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms.