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Once mountain ranges stop rising, the mighty forces of erosion will eventually rub them from Earth's face. In a paper in the August issue of Geology, researchers suggest that the European Alps may owe their sharp relief to a spell of wet weather that trimmed the mountains and caused them to rise once more. To date the timing and estimate the amount of material eroded from the Alps, the scientists examined 2.5-kilometer-deep cores taken from three sites in a basin to the north, where sediment has washed down from the mountains and accumulated for tens of millions of years.