The Säntis massif

28 July 2021

Around 850, A monk of St. Gall mentioned the Säntis in a letter. The Benedictine monk Desiderius Wetter (1702-1751) reported in his chronicle that on 14 November 1680, two clergymen and a naturalist from Zurich climbed the Säntis with a guide from Appenzell Innerrhoden.

Today, the Säntis is a tourist hotspot, easily accessible by cable car, and features a meteorological institute and a research centre.

The mighty, stratified rocky landscape of the Säntis massif (Canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden) forms the northern edge of the Alps, both geographically and geologically, and rises steeply above the foreland.

The rocks reveal significant differences. There are light and dark, hard and soft, vegetation-free and vegetation-covered rock layers. They were all deposited during the Cretaceous period, approximately 142 to 87 million years ago, under constantly changing environmental conditions in a sea that now forms the European continent.

Sea level was considerably higher in the Cretaceous than it is today, and the climate was significantly warmer. Each layer corresponds to a specific period. The virtual journey through time in the Steinpark starts 142 million years ago and ends 11 million years ago. The rocks reveal information about coral reefs in a tropical sea, including high and low tides, rivers, and dramatic environmental changes.

(Source: Martin Wyss, Hans Aeschlimann, Luzi Matille, Säntis Steinpark).