Pierres du Niton, Glacial erratics in Geneva harbor, Switzerland
The Pierres du Niton are two granite boulders rising from Lake Geneva with distinctly different heights above the waterline. The larger stone dominates the view while the smaller remains clearly visible from the shore.
During the last ice age, glacial ice from the Mont Blanc massif carried these rocks across the landscape and left them here as the glaciers retreated. In the 1700s a scientist named Horace-Bénédict de Saussure recognized their alpine origin and studied them.
The name Niton is debated: it may derive from Neptune, worshipped by Gauls at Lake Geneva as inscriptions from Geneva and Lausanne show, or from neiton, Vaud patois for the devil, a name given to blocks thought beyond human strength. The large rock is a worked cup-marked stone, possibly a base for a wooden god statue.
You can see these boulders from the Quai Gustave-Ador on the lake's left bank where the waterfront promenade offers good views. The clearest views come on days when the water is calm and the light is bright.
A bronze disc 85 mm across is set into the larger, farther rock, the Pierre du Niton, just below its highest point. Since 1902 the height 373.6 m above sea level has been fixed by law in the Geoinformationsverordnung, and it remains the datum for Swiss and Liechtenstein elevation figures. Maps up to the Siegfried map read about 3.26 m higher.
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