Alps

• 1. Introduction

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  The Alps stretch roughly 1200 km across Europe, from Nice on the Mediterranean to Trieste on the Adriatic and Vienna at the edge of the Pannonian Basin. Eight countries share the range: Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. Eighty-two peaks rise above 4000 m. Fourteen million people live among these mountains, and 120 million visitors arrive each year.

  In 1991, a mummified man surfaced from a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border. Nicknamed Ötzi, he had been killed there roughly 5300 years ago. He is the oldest known human mummy, and he was found near a high crossing route people had used for thousands of years. The mountains he walked were once seabed, lifted into peaks by colliding continents.

  These facts raise questions this documentary will follow. Why does a word that may mean white describe a chain of grazing pastures? How did marine rock end up at the summit of the Matterhorn? Why did people once blindfold themselves to cross these passes, then later flock here for poetry and skiing? And what does a shrinking blanket of ice mean for the rivers of half a continent?

• 2. A Misnamed Range

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  The English word Alps comes from the Latin Alpes, and its deeper roots run toward the colour white. The Latin may descend from the adjective albus, meaning white, or from the Greek goddess Alphito, whose name connects to alphita, the white flour, and to alphos, a dull white leprosy. The river god Alpheus is likewise said to derive from the Greek alphos and to mean whitish.

  Maurus Servius Honoratus, a grammarian of the late fourth century, wrote in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid that the Celts called all high mountains Alpes. Another thread traces the Latin to a pre-Indo-European word, alb, meaning hill. The name Albania belongs to that same family, used over the centuries for several mountainous regions of Europe, including the eastern Caucasus in Roman times and, occasionally, Scotland.

  In modern languages, the word alp, alm, albe, or alpe does not mean a peak at all. It names a high mountain pasture near or above the tree line, where livestock graze in summer and where huts and hay barns sometimes form tiny hamlets. By that logic, calling the mountains the Alps is a misnomer. The actual peaks carry their own words by nation: Horn, Kogel, Gipfel, and Spitze in German regions; Mont, Pic, Dent, and Aiguille in French ones; Monte, Corno, Pizzo, and Cima in Italian-speaking lands.

• 3. How The Peaks Were Built

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  The Alpine orogeny, the building of the range, began about 300 million years ago and unfolded in episodes. During the Mesozoic Era the Pangaean supercontinent broke apart, and the Tethys sea opened between Laurasia and Gondwana during the Jurassic Period. That sea was later crushed as plates closed in, part of the great Alpide belt that runs from Gibraltar through the Himalayas to Indonesia. The collision of the African and Eurasian plates, beginning in the late Cretaceous Period, raised the Alps.

  Under extreme compression, marine sedimentary rocks were thrust upward into recumbent folds and fault lines. As the new peaks eroded, marine flysch sediments settled into the foreland basin and were folded again as the mountain building pressed on. The structure that resulted stacks rock of European, African, and oceanic origin: continental European rock at the bottom, marine sediments above, and African plate material on top.

  The Matterhorn shows this layering in plain sight. Its tip is made of gneisses from the African plate, while the base below the glaciated zone is European basement rock. Sandwiched between them sits a sequence of Tethyan marine sediments and their oceanic floor.

  The range has not finished rising. Earthquakes still strike, typically between magnitude 6 and 7 on the Richter scale. Geodetic measurements record uplift of up to about 2.5 mm per year in the north, west, and central Alps, and around 1 mm per year in the eastern and south-western Alps.

• 4. Routes Through The Walls

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  For thousands of years, crossing routes called passes carried explorers, salt, wine, grain, textiles, and metals through depressions in the mountains. The oldest of all such travellers may be Ötzi himself, found on the Tisenjoch on the Austrian-Italian border. Merchant traffic moved on the backs of mules, horses, and even elephants, recalling Hannibal, usually along footpaths until heavier carts and sleighs came into use.

  The Romans built roads over several passes to control territory to the west, north, and north-east of their home base. In the medieval period, religious orders raised hospices at many summits to shelter travellers. The Great St Bernard Pass, at 2469 m, served the Romans and later carried Napoleon Bonaparte and 40,000 troops across in 1800. The Semmering Pass, the lowest at 984 m, has been a continuous trade route since the 12th century.

  The 19th century brought engineers who pierced the rock. The Mont Cenis Pass gave way to the Fréjus Rail Tunnel in 1871. In 1882 the 15 km Saint Gotthard Railway Tunnel opened, linking Lucerne with Milan, and ninety-eight years later the 16.9 km Gotthard Road Tunnel followed the same line. By the early 20th century, eight trans-alpine railway lines were running.

  The boldest crossing came on the 1st of June 2016, when the Gotthard Base Tunnel opened. Two single tubes of 57.1 km connect Erstfeld in the canton of Uri with Bodio in Ticino. It is the world's longest railway tunnel and the first to traverse the Alps on a flat route, now running hourly between cities such as Zurich and Milan.

• 5. Ice And Water

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  The Alps cover only about 11% of Europe's surface, yet they supply up to 90% of the water that reaches lowland Europe, especially arid areas and the summer months. Milan draws 80% of its water from Alpine runoff. The rivers feed at least 550 hydroelectric plants that each produce at least 10 MW. The Rhine, the Rhône, the Po by way of the Ticino, and the Danube by way of the Inn all rise here and empty into four different seas.

  Louis Agassiz transformed how people understood this ice. In the mid-19th century he argued that the Alps had been covered in ice at various intervals, an idea he formed studying rocks near his Neuchâtel home. He earned the name father of the ice-age concept. In the 1840s, at the Unteraar Glacier, he measured the ice moving 100 m per year, faster in the middle than at the edges. A permanent laboratory now sits inside a glacier under the Jungfraujoch, devoted to studying Alpine glaciers.

  Glaciers carve as they crawl, dragging rock and sediment that gouge out valleys. The Inn valley shows the terraced result, with debris from the most recent ice age at the bottom and older erosion above. The grinding stress cracks the ice loudly, which may explain why medieval people believed dragons lived in the mountains, and it opens crevasses that pose the greatest danger to climbers.

  The ice is retreating. The 1817 km2 of glacier recorded in 1876 had shrunk to 1342 km2 by 1973. Forty percent of Austria's glaciation has vanished since 1850, and thirty percent of Switzerland's. Snow cover duration has fallen 5.6% per decade over the last 50 years, a loss that reaches far beyond the mountains into the water supply of many European countries.

• 6. Life On The Slopes

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  Thirteen thousand species of plants grow in the Alpine regions, sorted by habitat and by soil that may be limestone or non-calcareous. The natural tree limit lies about 1200 m above sea level on the northern side, rising to 1500 m or even 1700 m on the southern slopes. Above the forest comes a band of dwarf pine, then Alpenrosen, then the alpine meadow where plants endure cold, dryness, and altitude.

  Gentians carry a royal name, after the Illyrian king Gentius, and 40 species bloom in the Alps between 1500 and 2400 m. D. H. Lawrence wrote of the Swiss gentians as darkening the day-time, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom. Higher still, flowering plants such as Ranunculus glacialis and Saxifraga biflora have been recorded above 4000 m. Eritrichium nanum, the King of the Alps, clings to rocky ridges at 2600 to 3750 m, while Edelweiss ranges from 1200 m to as high as 3400 m.

  Thirty thousand species of wildlife share these slopes, from snow fleas to brown bears. The alpine ibex climbs highest among mammals, sighted as high as 3000 m, living in caves and descending to graze. Marmots live almost exclusively above the tree line, as high as 2700 m, hibernating in groups for warmth. The most common bird, the alpine chough, scavenges at climbers' huts and at the Jungfraujoch.

  Some of the smallest residents are the oldest. Certain moths are believed to have evolved in this same habitat up to 120 million years ago, long before the mountains existed. In Émosson, in Valais, dinosaur tracks were found in the 1970s, probably dating from the Triassic Period.

• 7. Fear, Then Wonder

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  Radiocarbon-dated charcoal placed around 50,000 years ago was found in the Drachloch cave above the village of Vattis in the canton of St. Gallen, proof that prehistoric people reached the high peaks. Seven bear skulls in the cave may have been buried by those same people. For most of history, though, the summits were left to the valley dwellers below. People saw them as the abode of dragons and demons, and sometimes blindfolded themselves to cross the passes.

  A few dared the heights early. Charles VII of France ordered his chamberlain to climb Mont Aiguille in 1356, and the knight who reached the summit of Rocciamelone left a bronze triptych of three crosses, using ladders to cross the ice. In 1492, Antoine de Ville climbed Mont Aiguille and called the experience horrifying and terrifying. Leonardo da Vinci climbed a mountain, perhaps Monte Rosa, describing a sky blue like that of a gentian.

  Conrad Gessner became the first naturalist to ascend the mountains in the 16th century, writing that there he found the theatre of the Lord. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, born in Geneva in 1740, abandoned a law career for the mountains and joined the third ascent of Mont Blanc in 1787.

  Then the poets came. Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen, published in 1732, cast the peaks as mythical purity, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed in 1761 with Julie, or the New Heloise. In 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley visited Geneva. Shelley wrote Mont Blanc, Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon and Manfred, and Mary Shelley, overwhelmed by the scenery, conceived Frankenstein during a thunderstorm by Lake Geneva.

• 8. The Modern Playground

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  Mont Blanc was first climbed in 1786 and the Jungfrau in 1811, but most of the four-thousanders fell during the second half of the 19th century. Edward Whymper reached the top of the Matterhorn in 1865 after seven attempts, an ascent that marked the end of the golden age of alpinism. Karl Blodig was among the first to climb all the major 4000 m peaks, completing his series in 1911. The last of the six great north faces fell in 1938 with the first ascent of the Eiger Nordwand.

  Tourism grew alongside the climbers. Foreigners arrived early in the 19th century to admire the scenery and stay at spa resorts, and the Belle Époque filled the valleys with large hotels. The Jungfraubahn cog-railway carried tourists through a tunnel in the Eiger to the Jungfraujoch, above the eternal snow line. In 1882 the first figure skating championship was held in St. Moritz, and the first ski-lift was installed in 1908 above Grindelwald.

  The Winter Olympics came three times before the Second World War: Chamonix in 1924, St. Moritz in 1928, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936. In 1930 the Lauberhorn Race was run for the first time above Wengen, and the Hahnenkamm at Kitzbühel in the same year. The Lauberhorn downhill stretches 4.5 km, and racers reach 130 km/h within seconds of the start gate.

  The playground now faces its own ice. Since 2015 the number of high-altitude ski resorts and piste kilometres has declined, a likely result of a warming climate, with snow-making machines installed at many sites. The same retreat measured on the glaciers is reshaping the slopes built for sport.