Bernese Seeland is almost 2.5 meters lower than it was 100 years ago
Published: Sunday, Jun 2nd 2024, 10:00
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The Bernese Seeland is sinking. Depending on the location, the surface of the Great Moss is up to 2.4 meters lower than it was 100 years ago, as a new study in the "Swiss Journal of Geoscience" shows.
This data could be useful for soil remediation measures, as study author Claudia Röösli from the University of Zurich explained to the Keystone-SDA news agency.
The landscape, characterized by peat bogs, has been drained by a complex canal system over the last two centuries to enable agriculture on this extremely fertile soil. The region became Switzerland's vegetable belt.
However, as the peat has degraded due to agricultural overuse, the situation has become critical for agricultural production in some places, the researchers wrote in the study. Measures were therefore necessary. However, the exact extent of this degradation over the last 100 years has not yet been known across the board.
Cards discovered by chance
This precise statement has now been made possible by a unique map from 1920, which was discovered by chance in an archive, as Röösli explained. "For the historical map, the height of over 44,000 points was measured by hand," said the researcher. "That must have been an incredible effort. For us, the effort was already huge, and we only clicked on the points on the computer."
By digitizing the map and comparing it with today's data, the researchers were able to show exactly how the surface has changed for each of these points. This way, they know in which region the subsidence rate was highest. According to the researchers, this helps to determine the areas for which soil remediation is most important.
©Keystone/SDA
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