German Lang. Media: The Alps grow
Swimming Matterhorn
The Alps are an unavoidable topic for a newspaper published in Zürich. And it seems hard to find news about mountains millions of years old. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (published in whole Switzerland and Germany) reports, that the Alps are still growing – despite the (perhaps not so common) knowledge, that the “crash” between the African and European continental plates happened 50 million years ago, so that the plate movement already stopped. Well, snowboard freaks shouldn’t expect longer runs soon: the mountains rise about 1.3 Millimeter per year (0.05 inches). But why do the mountains grow if not because of plate tectonics? One can feel the surprise and fascination of the author Hans Dieter Sauer, that the answer to this (admittedly academic) question is: The Alps grow because they swim in the Earths mantle. Mountains like the Matterhorn or the Zugspitze lose one meter of stone every 1000-2000 years, Sauer reports. Like a melting iceberg slowly rises out of the water to adjust to the loss of weight, the alps rise according to their weight loss due to erosion. Sauer explains, that this was a hypothesis for years, but that it is proven now, because German scientists from the Research Center for Geoscience in Potsdam developed a new method to measure the erosion. Sauer doesn’t forget to mention in the end, that there is still some uncertainty and that the slight rising of the Alps might be due to the “recent” (in geological terms) melting of the ice of the last ice age, which plunged the Alps into the earths mantle.
Quick Picks:
Media versus Administration
Companies are allowed to cut the internet connection of employees to „protect“ them from distractions. The Department of Justice in Northrhine-Westphalia did the same, but some websites were still accessible, including the regional broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, the biggest public broadcaster in Germany) – until a few days ago. The minister of justice, Roswitha Müller-Piepenkötter, cut the connection to the WDR due to “substantial not work related distractions due to WDR videos”. This is legal, but the timing is bad, because the minister is heavily criticized these days by WDR reporting for mistakes related to a recent jailbreak. The staff manager at the Düsseldorf Court calls this „censorship“. Department officials reject such claims, of course, but it makes one suspicious, that the move stopped those employers, who used the WDR website to post criticism of bad working condition in the Department of Justice.
Village versus Google
This, too, is not science but in a broad sense technology journalism: Die Welt (and a couple of other German media) report, that the small town Ratingen (close to Düsseldorf) charges Google 20 Euro per street photographed for Google-Maps’ Street View, which adds up to (it’s a small town) 6180 Euro. The mayor of Ratingen hopes to encourage other towns all over the world to do the same, so that the rising costs would stop Google’s attempt to complete its web service. The German mayor critizes, that Google does not allow tenants or house owners to delete pictures of their houses, which violates the „right of informational self-determination“.
- Sascha Karberg
