Aareschlucht, Meiringen, Switzerland - Places of Geologic Significance on Waymarking.com

From wikipedia:

The Aareschlucht is a gorge that has been carved out by the river Aare. The 'Aareschlucht' is located at Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland, a region in the heart of Switzerland. The gorge is crossed by the river Aare, the flow of which through the narrow passage is greatly increased to approximately 12 km / h at the point that leaves the river Aareschlucht. The gap length is 1400 meters; at the narrowest point the gap is only one meter wide. The highest part of the gorge is 180 meters above the river.

In 1888 the gorge was made accessible to the public by the construction of a path between the rock walls and in 1912 night lighting was added to the gorge. The Aareschlucht has since become an important tourist attraction for the region and is open from the beginning of April to All Saints' Day. Apart from the road, the gorge can also be reached via the short Meiringen - Innertkirchen Railway, which has two stations in the rock wall along the gorge: on the side of the exit at Meiringen the Aareschlucht West station and at the eastern entrance at Innertkirchen the station Aareschlucht Ost located in a tunnel in the rock face.

From the official website:
The rock bar between Meiringen and Innertkirchen, the Kirchet, mainly consists of quite hard limestone. This rock was formed in the Cretaceous period about 130 - 60 million years ago as sea deposits that solidified into limestone over time (sediment in the Thetis, the geosyncline sea of ??the Alps).

When the alpine massif (Alpine fold) was formed about 15 million years ago, these sediment layers were bulged out as the sediment mantle of the crystalline mountains, but the rock in the area of ??the church is autochthonous, i.e. it was not moved and hardly folded. The limestone is therefore not very jagged and broken and therefore quite resistant to ice and water erosion. The glaciers of the ice ages, which began about 1 - 2 million years ago, have probably sanded down the rock of the Kirchet, but have not removed it.

In the first warm interglacial period when the glaciers retreated, the water eroded a gorge through the rock. In the cold period that followed, the glacier advanced again over the Kirchet. The gorge was filled with moraine. When the glacier retreated in the next warm period, the meltwater did not flush out the moraine material from the old gorge, but eroded a new gorge through the rock. In this way, new Aare gorges were created in the interglacial periods. According to Franz Müller's detailed observations, five earlier gorges can be found in addition to today's, which are completely or partially filled with moraine. The 'Lautere Schlauche', which starts at the parking lot at the entrance to the Aare Gorge in Meiringen and which runs more or less parallel to today's Aare Gorge, is a good example of this. To date, however, it has not been possible to date the origin of the individual gorges and to assign them to the different ice ages (Hantke, 1980).

Waymark is confirmed to be publicly accessible: yes Parking Coordinates: N 46° 43.197 W 008° 12.264 Access fee (In local currency): 9.00 Requires a high clearance vehicle to visit.: no Requires 4x4 vehicle to visit.: no Public Transport available: yes Website reference: [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log User Rating   08/22/2015 Becktracker visited it