Scandinavian fjords. Nature miracle

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Scandinavian fjords. Nature miracle

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The motor ship turns into a narrow two-hundred-meter throat of the bay, and unexpectedly ringing, almost solemn silence surrounds the traveler. Behind is the sound of the waves of the ever-stormy Norwegian Sea, and the ship, sailing through the ghostly clarity of the white northern night on the sleeping water, is surrounded only by kilometer-long sheer walls of the coast and the calm expanse of the bay. Only the cries of seagulls and the occasional noise of waterfalls breaking down from the gloomy cliffs disturb the majestic peace.

scandinavian fjords

A feeling of implausibility, of some kind of fabulous unreality, grips a person who, hour after hour, floats along such a "sea river" between gray bastions of rocks, only in some places interspersed with narrow green valleys. And involuntarily you think about what forces of nature managed to create this amazing land off the coast of Norway - the land of glaciers and waterfalls, granite islands, bays and straits, which has no equal in beauty and grandeur anywhere else on Earth.

The western part of Europe's largest Scandinavian Peninsula is occupied by the harsh and rocky Scandinavian Mountains, stretching almost 1700 kilometers from the Skagerrak Strait to the northernmost tip of this part of the world - Cape North Cape. Their steepness and inaccessibility is already evidenced by the fact that there are 178 tunnels on the two hundred-kilometer section of the Oslo-Bergen railway. That's what the mountains of Scandinavia are! Towering 1500-2400 meters above the waters of the Norwegian Sea, they consist of many plateaus and ridges separated by narrow, deep and winding bays - fjords.

On the map, their winding blue stripes look like hundreds of long sea tongues licking the coast of Norway at the same time. Fjords were formed in ancient times, when the whole of Scandinavia was occupied by a huge glacier. In its marginal parts, mighty ice streams pierced and deepened the ancient river valleys, descending directly into the sea and sending snow-white fleets of icebergs to sail along it. Later, when the glacier receded and the sea level rose, sea waters filled the gorges created by the ice, forming one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world - the region of the Great Northern Fjords.

Similar bays exist in other parts of the world - in New Zealand and Greenland, in southern Chile, on Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya. They are very reminiscent of fjords in their appearance and mountain lakes on the harsh Putorana Plateau in Siberia, not far from the city of Norilsk. But the Norwegian fjords, with their steep banks rising to 600-900 meters, streams of glaciers descending through the gorges and green spruce forests on the flat tops of the mountains, literally captivate the traveler with their harsh beauty.

The longest and deepest of them - Sognefjord - cuts into the coast for 220 kilometers with a width of only 3-6 kilometers. This real "sea river" impresses with its depth, reaching 1244 meters! In the depths of the peninsula, the Sognefjord is divided into several branches, one of which, the northernmost, begins at the foot of the lifeless rocky plateau of Yusteldabre. The glacier covering it - the largest in Europe - covers an area of almost 900 square kilometers. The thickness of the glacier in the center exceeds 300 meters, and along the edges, long tongues of ice slide down the gorges and give rise to numerous streams and rivers.

In the middle of the glacier is the one-of-a-kind Lake Duen, which fills a deep depression between the icy shores. On its blue surface go tourist boats, which prudently stay away from the ice heaps along the shores of the lake. Sometimes a solid piece of the ice stream breaks off and slides down the slope, breaking the peace of the lake with a roar and splash and filling the surroundings with a rumble and echoes.

Tourists, located on the decks of ships, spend hours admiring the majestic spectacle of steep rocky shores, from the height of which foamy streams of waterfalls fall right into the sea. All the highest waterfalls in Europe are concentrated here, surpassing in their power and fantastic pattern of jets the famous waterfalls of the Alps and the Pyrenees. The highest of them - Utigard - falls from a height of 610 meters. This is the fourth highest waterfall in the world after Angel in Venezuela (1054 meters), Tugela in South Africa (933 meters) and Yosemite in the USA (727 meters). Slightly inferior to Utigardu and its neighbors: Kile (561 meters), Mardalfoss (297 meters), Rjukanfoss (271 meters) and Vettifoss (260 meters). At least a dozen more water streams have a fall height of more than a hundred meters.

Particularly famous for the beauty of its waterfalls is Hardangerfjord, the southern neighbor of the Sognefjord. There are three of them here: the multi-jet Seven Sisters, the powerful Bridegroom and the Bride's Veil pouring down like a wide foamy fan. An ancient Scandinavian legend tells about seven beautiful sisters, to whom a strong and courageous Viking warrior came to woo. The sisters suggested that he choose any of them and come the next day with a veil for his chosen one. The young warrior bought a veil and was about to go for the bride, but at the last moment he stopped, not knowing which of the seven beauties he should choose. He did not budge, his beautiful sisters did not wait, and a brand new wedding veil remained hanging on the rock. And they all froze forever by the shore of the fjord in the form of three beautiful waterfalls. And to this day, seven gentle jets are pouring from a high cliff into the sea - seven sisters. And opposite, on the other side of the fjord, a mighty bridegroom flaunts, and not far from him, the bride's veil flows with light muslin lace.

In many fjords, the sun on a clear day shines in the spray of waterfalls with bright rainbows, and boats pass right under these seven-colored bridges. And in some places, small boats with tourists can sail directly between a sheer cliff and a noisy arc of the waterfall.

From the plane, the Norwegian coast seems like a stone lace, woven from hundreds and thousands of islets, capes, bays, fjords, shoals and rocks. However, for all its picturesqueness, it remains dangerous for numerous fishing boats that trade in these waters. The islands, however, protect ships from storm waves, but in the narrow straits, treacherous currents and underwater rocks lie in wait for sailors.

Everyone probably remembers the monstrous Maelstrom sea whirlpool described in the finale of Jules Verne's novel "20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". It is formed in one of the straits of the Westfjord near the Lofoten Islands, when the Maskestrom current (one of the branches of the Gulf Stream) collides here with an advancing tidal wave. More than once or twice ships perished in the depths of the Maelstrom, and the chilling stories of experienced sailors made it a kind of symbol of the all-devouring sea abyss.

The height of the tides off the coast of Norway reaches four meters. Therefore, in front of the narrow entrances to many fjords (which, moreover, usually have an underwater rocky threshold, which makes it even more difficult for water to pass into the bay), there is a significant difference in water levels. In some fjords, thanks to this, real "sea waterfalls" can be observed.

Glaciers descending from the mountains, as a rule, do not reach the coastline of the fjords. The period of climate warming, which has been going on for 200 years, caused the retreat of ice tongues, from which only ridges of moraine boulders remained in the coastal parts of the valleys. Only in the very north of the country, the Talvik glacier descends to the very shore of the Ijekelfjord. This is the only place on the mainland of Eurasia where you can see how the ice fields sliding into the water are broken off by waves and float away to the open sea. Sometimes, in calm weather, the tongue of the glacier sinks under the water and breaks there, so that icebergs float to the surface from the depths, frightening the passing seals.

The diversity and bizarre appearance of the rocks on the islands and capes of the fjord region gave rise to many legends and poetic names of individual islands and mountains. So, a narrow and high rock off the coast of Vestfjord is called Stoven ("Staff of the Giant"), another, Gestmanden ("Traveler's Cloak"), really resembles a horseman wrapped in a cloak and galloping somewhere through bad weather.

But probably the most famous island in Norway is Torgatten. It is a huge cliff 240 meters high, cut through at about half its height by a through natural grotto tunnel 270 meters long. The height of the entrance to the grotto from the southwest is 66 meters, and from the northeast - 36 meters. Curious tourists who managed to climb the cliff can admire from this tunnel, as if through a huge spyglass, the panorama of the sea with its islands, rocks and sailing ships. According to an ancient legend, a hole in the rock was pierced by an arrow of a giant, whose figure, turned into a cliff, is visible on the shore a few kilometers from the island.

In general, the coastal islands make up an essential part of the country of the fjords, complementing its harsh appearance with new, more cheerful colors. More than 150 thousand of these islands and islets are off the coast of Norway. The Norwegians call them "calf" ("cubs"). Indeed, looking at their rounded domes, turned by the sea and wet from the waves and splashes, one might think that these are the backs of the cubs of some fabulous sea animals frolicking in the water.

In each strait, the traveler expects new, unlike those already seen, landscapes. In terms of variety of views and vividness of impressions, the coast of Norway is unrivaled. And it is no coincidence that this small country is visited by four million tourists a year, who sometimes even come from other continents to see with their own eyes the majestic beauty of the northern fjords.

Author: B.Wagner

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