Old and wrinkled
The steep cliffs in the narrowest section of the Rhine Valley open up a view of the history of our landscape. They tell of the events of the past millions of years and bear witness to the unimaginable forces that shaped their current appearance. The Loreley owes its special shape to geological development, without which the myth would never have emerged. The history of the Loreley began 400 million years ago. At that time, in the Devonian, the area that is now the Middle Rhine was located near the South Pole in a strait between two continents. Material was deposited on their soil over thousands of years, which the rivers had washed in from continents that were still devoid of vegetation. Under the weight of the subsequent hundreds of meters thick sediments, the rocks that make up the rocks today emerged: slate and sandstone. In the subsequent Carboniferous epoch, the continents moved towards each other due to shifts in the earth's crust and collided. As a result, the ocean space in between was pushed together and folded, and the former seabed was raised into a mountain range around 320 million years ago. The gentle landscape of the plateau above the rocks bears witness to the time when, a few million years ago, in the late Tertiary period, the Rhine flowed northwards as a slow, meandering stream in a wide valley. The Loreley plateau was formed about a million years ago during the first great ice age when the Rhine created a flat bed here. The steep rocky slope is the result of the most recent events in earth's history: driven by the forces in the hot interior of the earth, the Rhenish Slate Mountains are being lifted up. This forces the river to dig deeper and deeper into the rock. In doing so, he changes direction, taking advantage of weak areas in the earth's crust. This created the multitude of loops, the narrowest of which carved the Loreley rock out of the rock over the course of almost a million years. Source: Text information board