Jan 22, 2022 09:00:00

Switzerland's famous Matterhorn turns out to be shaking once every two seconds

The Matterhorn at an altitude of 4478m, which rises on the border between Switzerland and Italy, is a popular mountain not only for tourists but also for mountaineers all over the world, and is a famous peak that symbolizes Switzerland. A research team at the Swiss Earthquake Bureau of the ETH Zurich has proved that the Matterhorn oscillates back and forth in a cycle of about once every two seconds.

Spectral amplification of ground motion linked to resonance of large-scale mountain landforms --ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X21005513

How the Matterhorn sways | @theU
https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/how-the-matterhorn-sways/

The research team said, 'The movement of the earth causes all objects to vibrate, but fortunately we cannot usually feel the vibrations. Natural frequencies that resonate with various objects around the world. We wanted to know if resonance vibrations were detected even in large mountains like Matterhorn. '

The Matterhorn has a mountaintop at an altitude of 4470 m, an emergency shelter 'Solvay Bibark' on the northeastern ridge, and seismographs at multiple locations at the foot of the mountain. These seismographs record all mountain movements in high resolution and automatically send them to the Swiss Seismic Bureau. The research team derived the resonance frequency and direction of the Matterhorn from the data sent.

As a result, it was found that the Matterhorn oscillated at 0.42Hz in the north-south direction and at the same frequency in the east-west direction. However, the amplitude range is approximately nanometers (1 billionth of a meter) to micrometers (1,000,000th of a meter), a level of sway that is almost imperceptible to humans.

It was also found that the sway of the mountaintop was up to 14 times stronger in the range of natural frequency compared to the reference point at the foot of the Matterhorn.

In addition, the research team has released a voice that makes the Matterhorn vibrate 80 times faster so that it can be heard by the human ear, and you can hear it by clicking the image below.

The research team predicts that mountains other than the Matterhorn are also vibrating in the same way. A survey of the Grosser Mythen in central Switzerland also found that the Grosser Mythen, much smaller than the Matterhorn, oscillated at about four times the frequency of the Matterhorn.

Jeffrey Moore, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Utah who participated in the Matterhorn study, said, 'This study, which investigated the vibrations of large mountains like the Matterhorn, shows the stability of slopes in the event of a strong earthquake. The movement of the ground at the foot of the mountain is amplified at the top of the mountain, and it is thought that landslides and rockfalls are likely to occur. '