About ten percent of the global riverine export of this toxic substance to oceans originates from this region - with potentially significant impacts on Arctic organisms
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IMAGE: Across the summit of the 2592-metre-high Hochvogel in the Allgäu region of Germany, a dangerous crack is gaping and growing. The southern side of the mountain threatens to slide into. view more
Credit: TU München
The entire summit of the 2592 metres high Hochvogel is sliced by a five metres wide and thirty metres long fracture. It continues to open up by up to half a centimetre 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