What would Switzerland be with out its mountains? It's certainly hard to imagine this part of the Swiss landscape missing. Even stranger is the idea of the whole country underwater - would Heidi have spent her days swimming around instead of frolicking in the Alpine meadows?

Hard as it is to picture, the land that is now Switzerland really did used to be covered by ocean, so what happened? How did a mountainous landscape rise from the ocean?

Unearthing clues under the sea

Swiss scientists have long known that material for the Alps came from the ocean floor - how else to explain the seabed rocks they found high in the mountains of Switzerland? Thanks to the SNSF's support of the Glomar Challenger, they had ample opportunity to confirm their theories as to how this had happened.

The Glomar Challenger was the vessel for an international deep-ocean drilling project, in which geologists from Zurich, Bern, Basel and Geneva took part. On the Glomar, they were able to drill up to 750 meters (nearly 2,500 feet) below the ocean floor. After analyzing the samples they had gathered this way and determining their age, these Swiss researchers were finally able to understand the details of this process.

Piecing together the continental puzzle

The clues came together to tell the following story: The African continent was originally attached to the American one, but it later broke off, drifting slowly towards what is now Europe. This was all due to shifting of the large plates of rock that make up the earth's crust.

Eventually, a collision occurred - the African rock plate pushed against that of Europe. The pressure caused both to rise up where the two of them met.

The lovely Mediterranean Sea ... was once a desert?

The origin of the Alps was actually one of many geological mysteries investigated by the ocean project, which ran from 1968 to 1983.

One thing scientists had wondered about was the history of the Mediterranean Sea. Studies on dry land had already shown that it had at some point already receded and then expanded again, but only after using the Glomar to drill into the seabed were they able to see the big picture.

The thick layers of salt they came across were an unexpected find - a sign of evaporation on a massive scale. The sea had clearly dried out entirely at some point.

Actually, this turned out to be another result of Africa's drift towards Europe. As Africa moved northward, it had closed the Strait of Gibraltar. As a result, water that evaporated from the Mediterranean was no longer replenished by water from the Atlantic. This steady process of drying out left the former sea nothing more than a vast desert valley.

It was not until 100,000 years later that Atlantic waters once again began to make their way through the Strait of Gibraltar, gradually transforming the barren basin to the impressive sea we know today.