At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Rhine_Graben … the Upper Rhine Plain is a rift valley formation – 220 miles in length. It is, in places. 50 km in width. It runs from the Basel region in lowland Switzerland to Frankfurt in the north. The plain, or graben, was formed in the Oligocene – a long time ago. However, there were geological changes in the late Eocene period, contemporary with the Alpine orogeny, The uplifting of the Alps – thought to have occurred as a result of the African plate hitting and pushing up against the Eurasian continental plate. It is also thought, as an aside, to have caused ripple effects even further north. The chalk hills of southern England are usually represented as ripples from that collision.
In 1356 an earthquake occurred in the Basel region, destroying the settlement that existed at that time. In other words, the rift valley is not an entirely dead feature. That is useful to note as in the last Ice Age the Upper Rhine Graben was host to hippopotami and various other large mammals such as mammoths [elephants]. See https://ceza.de/english/ice-age-in-the-upper-rhine-graben-hippopotamuses-lived-longer-in-europe-than-previously-thought-5637 … The findings are published in Current Biology . Hippopotami survived until the middle of the last Ice Age – betweern 47,000 and 31,000 years ago. These are interesting dates as the latter one chimes with the mass die off of megafauna in Australia and various animal bonebeds elsewhere in the world. The former date is quite close to the Laschamp Event – in the few thousand years prior to that upheaval. There were mass die offs at that time too. Mainstream were of the opinion that hippopotami and other sub tropical animals died out in Europe at the last interglacial. This occurred on the climate and geology trees around 100,000 years ago, or a little more, than the present interglacial period. Ice Ages are supposed to last for 100,000 years, roughly, but clearly there is something wrong if there was warm weather across Europe prior to the Laschamp Event. How was the 100,000 year timeline invented? On what evidence is it based? Was the last interglacial as recently as 50,000 years ago?
These finds, we are told at https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/the-ice-ages-warm-secret-hippos-lived-in-germany-30000-years-ago … challenges mainstream views of Europe’s ancient environment. It reveals that the last Ice Age was not uniformly cold and inhospitable across northern and central Europe. This is supported by animals displayed in cave art that reflect a savannah filled with animals more African than European. It suggests, at the least, a fairly warm climate that included bears and lions as well as elephants and hippopotami. In other words, the link above continues, Europe’s Ice Age was not a single frozen world but a mosaic of conditions. One way of trying to explain the warmth. Layers of sand and gravel and silts contain the bones of animals that lived thousands of years ago. How were they entombed in those sediments, we may wonder. For the research paper go to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.035 …