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The incredible ibex defies gravity and climbs a dam | Forces of Nature with Brian Cox – BBC

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A herd of wild goats treats a 500-foot concrete dam like a vending machine, and physics has almost nothing to say about it.

In “The Moth and the Flame,” an episode of the BBC series Forces of Nature with Brian Cox, physicist Brian Cox turns his camera on the Cingino Dam in Italy’s Piedmont region, where wild Alpine ibex climb a near-vertical masonry wall that looks like it should stop them cold. It doesn’t. Females and their kids pick their way across the stone face with a steadiness that has made the footage a recurring viral clip since the episode first aired in July 2016.

• The Cingino Dam is a masonry gravity dam built between 1925 and 1930 in Valle Antrona, standing roughly 46 to 50 meters (about 160 feet) tall at an elevation above 2,200 meters.
• The ibex climb the dam specifically to lick salt and mineral deposits — calcium and other sodium-rich compounds — that leach through the stone.
• Their grip comes from cloven hooves that split and articulate independently, with hard outer edges for traction and soft, rubbery pads underneath for friction, backed by dewclaws and callused leg joints.

Dam Selection Over Mountain Site

Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) spend most of their lives on Alpine grassland and scree slopes well above 2,000 meters, foraging on vegetation that’s chronically short of sodium and other essential minerals. That deficiency hits lactating females hardest, since nerve, muscle, and bone function all depend on a mineral supply their high-altitude diet simply can’t provide. The Cingino Dam, built decades before any ibex ever set a hoof on it, happens to leach exactly the salts and calcium they’re missing — turning a 1920s piece of hydroelectric infrastructure into the richest mineral lick for miles.

That’s the detail Cox’s cameras catch that a casual viewer might miss: this isn’t showmanship or idle scrambling. Every ascent is a calculated trip to a food source, weighed against a fall that would kill them instantly.

The Anatomy That Makes It Possible

What looks like defiance of gravity is really a hoof built for exactly this job. Ibex hooves are cloven — split into two toes that move independently, almost like pincers, letting each half of the foot find its own purchase on a different asperity in the rock. The outer rim of each hoof is hard and sharp enough to bite into tiny ledges barely wider than a coin, while the underside carries a soft, rubbery pad that behaves almost like a suction cup against smooth stone, maximizing friction rather than relying on a hard edge alone.

Dewclaws add extra stabilizing points of contact on steep pitches, and thickened, callused joints on stocky, muscular legs absorb the shock of leaping from one masonry course to the next. None of it is unique to ibex living near dams — it’s the same equipment that lets the species work vertical cliff faces in the wild. Cingino just happens to be the version people can watch from a safe distance with a camera.

A wall built in 1930 to hold back water has become the richest salt lick in the Piedmont Alps — and the ibex found it.

Cox’s Larger Argument

Forces of Nature is built around the idea that a small set of physical rules — gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces — quietly shapes everything from snowflakes to mountain ranges. The Cingino sequence works as his centerpiece for friction and gravity because the footage is so counterintuitive: an animal small enough to fit in the back of a truck, balanced on a wall angled to resist water pressure, not predators or wind. It’s the kind of clip that needs no narration to land, which is likely why it’s been clipped and shared far beyond the original broadcast.

Viewers who enjoy watching animals push physical limits in terrain that seems built to stop them might also get a kick out of the near-misses and mistakes climbers make on far less forgiving rock, or the sheer range of survival strategies on display in some of the most extreme wild animal encounters caught on camera.

The dam’s owner, the Italian utility that operates the Cingino hydroelectric plant, has never needed to do anything about the ibex — the animals cause no damage to the structure and the salt-licking has gone on for years without incident. The goats will be back the next dry season, working the same cracks in the same wall, because the minerals they need aren’t going anywhere else.