The Dolomites

The geological relevance of the Dolomites lies in the fact they tell an important part of the history of our Planet and reveal how the Earth and climate have evolved in the last 300 million years. To re-enact the processes that led to the birth of the Dolomites, we must go back in time and precisely back to the Permian period (280 million years ago), when a sea gulf, Thetis, stood at the border with the Pangaea and the rocks of the Dolomitic area started to grow on its coasts out of sedimentary fields and volcanic events; the result was a tropical sea (Triassic, 250 million years ago) that had been quite calm for over 8 million years and was dotted with atolls, lagoons and volcanic cones. 240 million years ago, a high number of organisms (reef builders) began to make the atolls grow and the sea level drop, thus creating an archipelago of islands that looked very much like today’s Maldives. Vegetal fossils from that time (230 million years ago) bear evidence of tropical forests. That’s why the Dolomites should be conceived as a big fossil archipelago that can be found nowhere else in the world. For millions of years, such big reefs grew, then were buried under lava and volcanic tufa; then, a number of geological turbulences reinstated favourable conditions for the growth of a new generation of reefs, which became home to several species of fish and molluscs. Then (Norian, 228 million years ago), the sea rose, causing recurring floods and burying over one thousand metres of flatlands, where seaweed fields throve, under layers of carbonate mud (Dolomia principale). Cyclical soil and marine sediments created flat, muddy areas, in which a few reptile species made their appearance. In the Lower Jurassic (210 million years ago), the sea level began to decrease, thus sinking the Dolomite region, which was buried under more pelagic sediments. Such an environment, with its strong oceanic currents, was inhabited by ammonites, big molluscs with a distinctive flat-spiralled shell, the fossils of which are now set in red-coloured layers of rock (Rosso ammonitico). Orogeny, the birth of the mountain ridge of the Alps, took place through a rising and wrinkling process by the end of the Cretaceous age (65 million years ago), when Africa and Europe collided. In the Dolomites, such violent tectonic shifts happened differently, though, since these big sedimentary bodies managed to defend themselves, in their sequences. So, we can see that Dolomitic rocks are engraved with their own ‘biography’, which scientists have tried to investigate to learn more about the past and make assumptions about the future.

The Dolomites have extremely high geomorphological relevance as a geographic area that offers a wide variety of minerals and shapes in its rocks: ranging from sheer walls that can be as high as 1600 metres to 500 to 1500 metre deep gorges. In the Dolomites, just a little less than 100 mountains are over 3000 metres high, while smallish glaciers and perennial snowfields can be found at comparatively low levels. The area included in the UNESCO List covers a surface of 141,903 hectares. As in a huge outdoor laboratory, one can distinguish several types of rocks, such as, for instance, pale limestone walls made up of dolomite layers, dark seams of volcanic origin, or iron-rich red seams. The name of the nine mountain ridges included in the World Heritage List in 2009 comes from Déodat de Dolomieu, a French naturalist who in 1789 was the first to find and explore a typical local mineral, dolomite, a carbonate coralline rock that looks like light, crystalline limestone.

The typical landscape of the Dolomites consists of soft green belts, first of woods, then prairies, with unmistakable, giant rocky peaks shooting out of them. Because of their chemical composition, the Dolomites have a very special relationship with light, the so-called Enrosarida (from Ladin, the Dolomitic enrosadöra and rosadüra, ‘blushing’ – Dizionario Zingarelli). Enrosarida is a natural phenomenon that colours the Dolomites gold, red, pink, amber and purple at sunrise and at sunset, when the clear sky is lit up by the first or last sunrays. Even moonlight plays with the Dolomites, giving them an otherworldly brilliance. When the sun is at its zenith, the Dolomites get ‘pale’, almost imperceptible, instead, so much that a folk tradition called them Monti Pallidi, Pale Mountains, a fairy-tale name that aptly captures so many geological and geomorphological properties. “Dolomitic landscape” is the universal archetype of a specific mountain landscape that stands out for a wide variety of shapes and colours. Scientific explorations began in the XIX century, producing the first few guidebooks and illustrations, while Romantic creativity got passionate about their grandness and put them in the sphere of the “sublime”. 19^th-century travel literature, as well as the first popular scientific texts by Leopold von Buch and Alexander von Humbolt, created the legend of the Dolomites as a natural theatre of incomparable beauty and spread their fame all over the world. With the books The Dolomite Mountains by J. Gilbert and G.C. Churchill (1864) and the guidebook The Eastern Apls by J. Ball (1868), the name ‘The Dolomites’ became universal and was even shared by all of the official maps. In people’s imagination, the Dolomites became known for their epical giant size and the geometrical volumes of the carbonate bodies, the natural blades, towers and belfries of the Dolomites transformed into the remains of legendary lost cities.

This mountain group is dominated by Mount Pelmo (3,168 m) and is a system that stretches from Mount Penna to Passo Giau, along the Boite Valley, the Zoldo Valley, the Fiorentina Valley, the Codalonga Valley and the Costeana Valley.

Marmolada (3,343 m) is the highest mountain of the Dolomites and has the largest glacier: because of such record-breaking numbers as well as its sublime beauty, the Marmolada is called the “Queen of the Dolomites”. It stands out for its volcanic base, covered in soft grassy and woody slopes, with wild rocky spurs shooting out of them. Marmolada is a fossil atoll; volcanic eruptions submitted it to exceptional tectonic deformations.

This ridge provides wide geological and geomorphological variety, with signs of erosion from karst phenomena, ice and water. In particular, on Pale di San Martino, the Fradusta Plateau is an example of a Dolomitic reef unearthed by the deep erosion of the top layers. The northern part of the mountain ridge consists of a huge, intact fossil reef.

This is one of the most uncontaminated and wild mountain groups. The natural symbol of this system is the Campanile di Val Montanaia (2,173 m), in the Monfalconi group, a pinnacle that rises in the midst of an incredibly quaint glacier basin.

This is the largest ridge (53,586 hectares), boasting the most famous sights and the best-known mountains, such as the Dolomites at Sesto, the Cadini group, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the Braies, Fanes and Senes groups, Croda Rossa, Tofane, Mount Cristallo (3.221 m), Antelao (the second highest mountain of the Dolomites, at 3,264 metres asl), Sorapis, Marmarole. With such an extraordinary clear and complete sequence of layers, these groups outstandingly tell the geological history of the Dolomites.

This group is lovingly guarded by the beautiful Funes, Badia and Gardena Valleys, where the stratigraphic sequence of the rocky bodies, from the Permian to the Cretaceous, reveals the most important happenings in the history of the Dolomites.

This mountain ridge takes up an area of 9,302 hectares and has an elongated shape, as a sort of upturned C that starts north from Sciliar, goes down south—east to Catinaccio, and then lower down south-west with Latemar. This area is a favourite with climbers and has inspired some of the most famous local legends – the legend of King Laurino and the legend of the rainbow of Lake Carezza.

It is a natural monument with a gorge dug by the Bletterbach torrent with over 400 metre high walls and waterfalls thundering down dozens of metres. The canyon offers incomparable stratigraphic evidence that tells about the geological events the Dolomites went through from the Permian to the Triassic age.

The exceptional natural, scenic and geological importance of this Dolomite ridge is protected by Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta (1998); the Brenta Dolomites are an 11,135-hectare dolomitic island.

The Dolomitic area was the tragic theatre of the war between the Italian troops and the Austro-Hungarian army. The largest Eco-Museo della Prima Guerra Mondiale (World War One Eco-Museum) was set up there to commemorate those pages of the history of Europe; it includes multiple outdoor venues (such as: Lagazuoi – 5 Torri – Sasso di Stria; Monte Piana – Tre Cime di Lavaredo – Dolomiti d’Auronzo), laid out as historical-natural trails with specific signs, so visitors can see the restored trenches and stations.

Source and info: http://www.ecomuseograndeguerra.it 

was a French geologist whom the Dolomites have been named after. A scientist from Savoy, France, and a distinguished professor of the École des Mines in Paris, while travelling from Tyrol to Italy in 1788, near the Adige valley next to Salorno, he sampled a carbonate rock that reacted to the acid solution in an unprecedented way. Intrigued by this finding, he sent a few samples to Nicolas Theodore de Saussure, a Swiss mineralogist, who tested them and described them as calcium and magnesium carbonate. The new mineral was called “Dolomite”, from which the Dolomites take their name. Dolomieu was further involved in the scientific debate on the Dolomites: in 1789, he published a revolutionary and prophetic treatise on the dating of intrusive and effusive volcanic rocks.

► «Di fronte a noi si ergeva una colossale roccia, uno dei più prodigiosi monumenti delle forse della Natura. La sua parte inferiore si innalzava in piani digradanti come la Torre di Babele nelle immagini dell’Antico Testamento. Sopra era un perfetto precipizio, un blocco in posizione verticale, la cui cima era 4.000 o 4.500 piedi sopra le nostre teste. Dietro a questo gigantesco mastio, una grande fortezza di roccia stendeva le sue lunghe fila di torrette e bastioni. Ma come ci avvicinammo alla sua base, la grande torre saliva isolata e libera, e l’audacia del suo profilo diventava quasi incredibile […] e combinava a un tempo la nobile solidità della montagna svizzera con la peculiare struttura verticale che dà alle Dolomiti la loro strana somiglianza all’architettura umana»

Douglas William Freschfield, The Italian Alps, 1875

► «Il massiccio innevato della Marmolata [sic], 10.400 piedi di altitudine, è soprannominata la regina delle Dolomiti; ma è una regina austera e orgogliosa, che sa come tener testa e mantenere a distanze gli intrusi; e molti di coloro che da lontano sono stati incantati dalla sua severa bellezza, hanno maledetto il tentativo di invadere la fredda solitudine della sua eterna penitenza».

Rachel Harriette Busk, The Valley of Tirol, 1874

► «Sono cresciuto nelle Dolomiti e, dopo mille e più spedizioni alpinistiche nella mia terra, sono stato in tutte le montagne del mondo. La mia conclusione è la seguente: nessuna montagna può competere in bellezza con le Dolomiti. Le Dolomiti sono inconfondibili: nella loro varietà di forme, nella geologia e soprattutto nell’aspetto del paesaggio, che vive del contrasto fra pascoli che si stendono in orizzontale e formazioni rocciose che si sviluppano in verticale. E come lo è per me, anche per molti altri esperti il paesaggio di roccia fra il Brenta e Udine, fra il Putia e Pordenone il più bello del mondo»

Reinhold Messner, Lettera di supporto alla candidatura, 27 dicembre 2007

►  “Queste bellissime montagne per molti secoli rimasero una terra di fiabe che aveva solo ripidi sentieri e valli impervie, nelle quali gli abitanti delle città non s’inoltravano. Anche i contadini ed i pastori che vivevano nei piccoli paesini di montagna si avvicinavano con un certo rispettoso orrore ai boschi montuosi e alle malghe distese ai piedi delle pareti rocciose; essi ritenevano che quelle lande disabitate fossero la dimora preferita di spiriti maligni, di numerosi giganti ed altre cupe creature mitiche”.

Reinhold Messner, Le mie dolomiti, Tappeiner Editore, p. 96

www.dolomitiunesco.info/categoria-pubblicazioni/biblioteca/

whc.unesco.org/en/list/1237

www.unesco.beniculturali.it

www.dolomitiunesco.info

The geological relevance of the Dolomites lies in the fact they tell an important part of the history of our Planet and reveal how the Earth and climate have evolved in the last 300 million years. To re-enact the processes that led to the birth of the Dolomites, we must go back in time and precisely back to the Permian period (280 million years ago), when a sea gulf, Thetis, stood at the border with the Pangaea and the rocks of the Dolomitic area started to grow on its coasts out of sedimentary fields and volcanic events; the result was a tropical sea (Triassic, 250 million years ago) that had been quite calm for over 8 million years and was dotted with atolls, lagoons and volcanic cones. 240 million years ago, a high number of organisms (reef builders) began to make the atolls grow and the sea level drop, thus creating an archipelago of islands that looked very much like today’s Maldives. Vegetal fossils from that time (230 million years ago) bear evidence of tropical forests. That’s why the Dolomites should be conceived as a big fossil archipelago that can be found nowhere else in the world. For millions of years, such big reefs grew, then were buried under lava and volcanic tufa; then, a number of geological turbulences reinstated favourable conditions for the growth of a new generation of reefs, which became home to several species of fish and molluscs. Then (Norian, 228 million years ago), the sea rose, causing recurring floods and burying over one thousand metres of flatlands, where seaweed fields throve, under layers of carbonate mud (Dolomia principale). Cyclical soil and marine sediments created flat, muddy areas, in which a few reptile species made their appearance. In the Lower Jurassic (210 million years ago), the sea level began to decrease, thus sinking the Dolomite region, which was buried under more pelagic sediments. Such an environment, with its strong oceanic currents, was inhabited by ammonites, big molluscs with a distinctive flat-spiralled shell, the fossils of which are now set in red-coloured layers of rock (Rosso ammonitico). Orogeny, the birth of the mountain ridge of the Alps, took place through a rising and wrinkling process by the end of the Cretaceous age (65 million years ago), when Africa and Europe collided. In the Dolomites, such violent tectonic shifts happened differently, though, since these big sedimentary bodies managed to defend themselves, in their sequences. So, we can see that Dolomitic rocks are engraved with their own ‘biography’, which scientists keep studying.

The Dolomites have extremely high geomorphological relevance as a geographic area that offers a wide variety of minerals and shapes in its rocks: ranging from sheer walls that can be as high as 1600 metres to 500 to 1500 metre deep gorges. In the Dolomites, just a little less than 100 mountains are over 3000 metres high, while smallish glaciers and perennial snowfields can be found at comparatively low levels. The area included in the UNESCO List covers a surface of 141,903 hectares. As in a huge outdoor laboratory, one can distinguish several types of rocks, such as, for instance, pale limestone walls made up of dolomite layers, dark seams of volcanic origin, or iron-rich red seams. The name of the nine mountain ridges included in the World Heritage List in 2009 comes from Déodat de Dolomieu, a French naturalist who in 1789 was the first to find and explore a typical local mineral, dolomite, a carbonate coralline rock that looks like light, crystalline limestone.

The typical landscape of the Dolomites consists of soft green belts, first of woods, then prairies, with unmistakable, giant rocky peaks shooting out of them. Because of their chemical composition, the Dolomites have a very special relationship with light, the so-called Enrosarida. Enrosarida is a natural phenomenon that colours the Dolomites gold, red, pink, amber and purple at sunrise and at sunset. Even moonlight plays with the Dolomites, giving them an otherworldly brilliance. When the sun is at its zenith, the Dolomites get ‘pale’, almost imperceptible, instead, so much that a folk tradition called them Monti Pallidi, Pale Mountains, a fairy-tale name that aptly captures so many geological and geomorphological properties. “Dolomitic landscape” is the universal archetype of a specific mountain landscape that stands out for a wide variety of shapes and colours. Scientific explorations began in the XIX century, producing the first few guidebooks and illustrations, while Romantic creativity got passionate about their grandness and put them in the sphere of the “sublime”. 19^th-century travel literature created the legend of the Dolomites as a natural theatre of incomparable beauty.

This mountain group is dominated by Mount Pelmo (3,168 m) and is a system that stretches from Mount Penna to Passo Giau, along the Boite Valley, the Zoldo Valley, the Fiorentina Valley, the Codalonga Valley and the Costeana Valley.

Marmolada (3,343 m) is the highest mountain of the Dolomites and has the largest glacier: because of such record-breaking numbers as well as its sublime beauty, the Marmolada is called the “Queen of the Dolomites”. It stands out for its volcanic base, covered in soft grassy and woody slopes, with wild rocky spurs shooting out of them. Marmolada is a fossil atoll; volcanic eruptions submitted it to exceptional tectonic deformations.

This ridge provides wide geological and geomorphological variety, with signs of erosion from karst phenomena, ice and water. In particular, on Pale di San Martino, the Fradusta Plateau is an example of a Dolomitic reef unearthed by the deep erosion of the top layers. The northern part of the mountain ridge consists of a huge, intact fossil reef.

This is one of the most uncontaminated and wild mountain groups. The natural symbol of this system is the Campanile di Val Montanaia (2,173 m), in the Monfalconi group, a pinnacle that rises in the midst of an incredibly quaint glacier basin.

This is the largest ridge (53,586 hectares), boasting the most famous sights and the best-known mountains, such as the Dolomites at Sesto, the Cadini group, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the Braies, Fanes and Senes groups, Croda Rossa, Tofane, Mount Cristallo (3.221 m), Antelao (the second highest mountain of the Dolomites, at 3,264 metres asl), Sorapis, Marmarole. With such an extraordinary clear and complete sequence of layers, these groups outstandingly tell the geological history of the Dolomites.

This group is lovingly guarded by the beautiful Funes, Badia and Gardena Valleys, where the stratigraphic sequence of the rocky bodies, from the Permian to the Cretaceous, reveals the most important happenings in the history of the Dolomites.

This mountain ridge takes up an area of 9,302 hectares and has an elongated shape, as a sort of upturned C that starts north from Sciliar, goes down south—east to Catinaccio, and then lower down south-west with Latemar. This area is a favourite with climbers and has inspired some of the most famous local legends – the legend of King Laurino and the legend of the rainbow of Lake Carezza.

It is a natural monument with a gorge dug by the Bletterbach torrent with over 400 metre high walls and waterfalls thundering down dozens of metres. The canyon offers incomparable stratigraphic evidence that tells about the geological events the Dolomites went through from the Permian to the Triassic age.

The exceptional natural, scenic and geological importance of this Dolomite ridge is protected by Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta (1998); the Brenta Dolomites are an 11,135-hectare dolomitic island.

Some of the oldest drops of amber – fossil resin – (about 225 million years ago) were found near Cortina d’Ampezzo. Despite their small size, which is the result of the powerful compression they underwent while they fossilised, they contain pollen, ash and fragments of plants.

was a French geologist whom the Dolomites have been named after. A scientist from Savoy, France, and a distinguished professor of the École des Mines in Paris, while travelling from Tyrol to Italy in 1788, near the Adige valley next to Salorno, he sampled a carbonate rock that reacted to the acid solution in an unprecedented way. Intrigued by this finding, he sent a few samples to Nicolas Theodore de Saussure, a Swiss mineralogist, who tested them and described them as calcium and magnesium carbonate. The new mineral was called “Dolomite”, from which the Dolomites take their name. Dolomieu was further involved in the scientific debate on the Dolomites: in 1789, he published a revolutionary and prophetic treatise on the dating of intrusive and effusive volcanic rocks.

Pangaea, noun, a word coined by A. Wegener in the early 20^th century to mean the one and original continental mass, which separated into multiple continents, as we know them now.

Sedimentary, adj., from sediment, which is something formed by the settlement of substances over a given time span.

Orogeny, from the Greek òros, mountain, and gènesis, birth; in geology, it is s technical term that means the process of formation of a mountain group or ridge.

Carbonate, noun (carbonate rock), sedimentary rocks are those that come from the hardening or welding of sediments heaped up on the earth’s surface at sea or in the air through chemical processes. Sedimentary rocks from natural chemical processes are mainly or totally composed of carbonate grains or ores (calcite and dolomite) and are known as carbonate rocks. In the Dolomites, there are plenty of rocky walls in which the horizontal sedimentary layers that have settled on top of each other are clearly visible.

Sublime, noun, an aesthetic category dating back to ancient philosophy which is concerned with “extreme things”; the sublime challenges man with extreme, dangerous experiences, as it happens when man tries to fight the power of Nature. In XVII- and XVIII- century philosophy, the sublime becomes one of the key issues of modern aesthetics.

Atoll, noun, a ring-shaped coral reef.

Bivalve, noun, water molluscs, mainly living in the sea, having a shell consisting of two hinged valves.

Sampling, taking a sample of material from a rock, or, more generally, from a few components of the same species.