It looks like a scene from an adventure film. Three men hang from ropes above an almost vertical chalk cliff, with Étretat's famous pebble beach below them. Every movement is precise, every glance focused on the fragile rock. Their goal initially sounds contradictory: they want to trigger a rockfall in order to prevent exactly that. Crazy? Only at first glance. At the Falaise d'Aval, one of France's best-known cliff coasts, specialists deliberately dislodged a rock block weighing around 400 kilograms from the cliff face. The rock fell onto the beach, ...
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