Hohenems-Unterklien quarry

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Caterpillar in the Unterklien quarry

The Hohenems-Unterklien quarry is a quarry located in the Unterklien district of the Austrian city ​​of Hohenems . The Unter Klienbach separates the Unterklien quarry from the district to the south, while the municipality border to the city of Dornbirn is directly adjacent to the north .

history

The first documented mention of a quarry in Hohenems goes back to 1610. On May 19, 1610, Count Kaspar von Hohenems granted his valet Peter von Ried, who later was Vogt of Dornbirn, the right to break whetstones in the county (see: Whetstone production (Reichsgrafschaft Hohenems) ). In 1826, the Hohenems community opened a quarry in the Unterklien parcel to produce ballast, paving and whetstones .

Until the beginning of the 20th century, the Unterlien quarry was largely leased without written contracts. With the increasing mechanization of agriculture and the increased production of artificial whetstones, the economic importance of the production of whetstones from sandstone was lost after the Second World War.

During the Second World War , production in the quarry was temporarily stopped, and the site was instead used as a subsidiary of "Glaukonit AG", which produced gears for the German war industry. After "Glaukonit AG" was blown up by the French occupying forces, the quarry was resumed in 1948.

In 1970 the Bregenz construction company W. Rhomberg bought the Unterklien quarry and founded the subsidiary “Rhomberg Steinbruch GmbH & Co.”, which belongs to the Rhomberg Group . From 2006, the quarry area was no longer used exclusively for processing broken rock material, but also as a location for recycling material . Primarily mineral raw materials were processed. Today, the Unterklien quarry is part of the Rheintal Resource Center, where materials and raw materials are not only extracted, but also reprocessed and returned to the material cycle.

The Rhomberg Group has been planning to expand the quarry in Hohenems-Unterklien for years in order to be able to meet the demand for building materials in Vorarlberg with local stone in the future. There is considerable resistance from the neighbors.

Geology of the quarry

The oldest rock of the quarry wall was the layer sequence of the Drusberg Formation , a series of brownish, weathered, water-impermeable, dark marl slate with clay, clay-marl and marly-calcareous intermediate layers.

Beneath the Drusberg Formation follows the 110 m thickest layer of the rock face, the Schrattenkalk . Schrattenfluh, a mountain range in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, is named after the Schrattenkalk . This limestone layer from the Cretaceous period forms characteristic "shady" (note: Schratten = cart - "chemical leaching effects of rain and meltwater", leads to the formation of gullies, furrows) surface shapes. The layers between 470 and 580 m above sea level of the Unterklien quarry consist of this lightly weathered rock, permeated by marl deposits .

This is followed by the so-called Gault formation, which mainly includes quartzitic green sandstone from the Lower Cretaceous period. In this rock layer, which is around 25 m thick on the Unterkliener rock face, a very slow deposit can be seen.

Under the Gault formation lies the Seewerkalk, a light, fine-grained lime that can be broken into mussels and has a large number of up to 1 mm large shells from primeval plankton animals (so-called globotruncans). While the Seewerkalk was previously used, among other things, to make paving stones, it is now often used as a filling material for stone baskets.

At the bottom, the Amden formation forms the youngest layer of the Unterklien rock face. The name comes from the Swiss town of Amden on Lake Walen. It is a largely monotonous formation of gray, finely laminated to laminated marl, which appears dark gray to black when tectonized.

Special

A special feature is that in the Hohenems parcel Klien the original layers of the sediments are "upside down": the old layers are on top and the young layers are below. Reason: As a result of the alpine folds and thrusts caused by the thrust of the African plate against Europe, which began around 110 million years ago and lasted up to 40 million years ago, a so-called inverse stratification (overturned fold) formed. In the ice ages, which began around 640,000 years ago and ended around 11,000 years ago, the Hohenems rock faces were more or less their present-day formation through the grinding effect of the Ill Rhine glacier and the melting ice. In the high ice age, 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, the summit of the Hohe Kugel was just sticking out of the ice cover near Hohenems.

Web links

Commons : Steinbruch Rhomberg  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meinrad Pichler: The emigration of Vorarlbergers to America. Retrieved August 1, 2018 .
  2. ↑ box . In: Hohenems municipal archive . 126_O6. Hohenems, S. 27 .
  3. ↑ Dornbirner Anzeiger, Thursday, July 10, 2014, p. 31; Bruno Koch, On the history of the Schwarzacher whetstone production , p. 48.
  4. ↑ Evelyn Grimm: The history of the Jews in Hohenems. Retrieved September 20, 2010 .
  5. ^ Burghart Häfele: The "Glaukonit AG" (Ostwerk). In: Emser Almanach . tape 16 . Hohenems 2007.
  6. ↑ Bernd Babutzky: The quarry in Unterlien . In: Nature and Economy . tape 3 . Dornbirn 1983.
  7. ↑ New establishment of the company Steinbruch Rhomberg GmbH & Co OG . In: Folder quarry notes 1975, 1976, 1977 . March 31, 1977.
  8. ^ Rhomberg Bau GmbH: quarry. Retrieved August 1, 2018 .
  9. ↑ The quarry for the Rhine Valley. Retrieved August 1, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Lins gives little chance of quarry expansion , ORF Vorarlberg from July 21, 2018.
  11. ^ Rhomberg quarry: No agreement in sight , ORF.at of July 17, 2006.
  12. ↑ Heiner Bertle: Supplements to the chronicle of the quarry in Unterlien . September 2010.
  13. ↑ Hans Murawski: Geological Dictionary . Stuttgart 1977.
  14. ↑ Angela Maria Amann: Diploma thesis Metamorphoses . Ed .: University of Innsbruck. Innsbruck 2003.
  15. ↑ Heiner Bertle: Supplements to the chronicle of the quarry in Unterlien . May 2008.
  16. ^ J. Georg Friebe: Geology of the Austrian federal states - Vorarlberg . Vienna 2007.
  17. ↑ The formation of the Alps. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on November 27, 2012 ; accessed in 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geologie.ac.at
  18. ↑ Rudolg Oberhauser: Explanations of the Geological Map of the Republic of Austria 1: 25,000. Retrieved September 20, 2010 .

Coordinates: 47 ° 22 ′ 57 ″  N , 9 ° 43 ′ 14 ″  E