Question
I've been wondering about this for a while. Sweden, Norway and Finland are by far the countries with the most islands worldwide. I haven't done the calculations, but the rest of the world combined probably doesn't have as many as even one of them. So what is so special about Scandinavia compared to other places that formed all these islands? It obviously has something to do with glaciers that slowly retreated which also formed the Fjords. But I don't understand why that effect impacted Scandinavia so much more than Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Canada has a lot of islands aswell, but even though it is a lot larger it doesn't even come close to the amount of Scandinavia.
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The shield of mountains stretching from the Southern tip of Norway to the Northwest of Finland largely stopped the more heavy and scouring glaciers from depressing the land that would become the Gulf of Bothnia to the same extent they depressed the land in Northern Canada and Siberia.
Is Bothnia part of the former Yugothlavia
Mike Tyson's World Atlas.
Atlath
A world of thpain.
Your behaviour is unconscionable
Mike Tyson had a stroke.
Ahtlas
Many Bothans died to bring us this information
Bothnia and Herthegothina
Bothnia . . . . . . and Herthovinthia
I’ll have the quethadilla
Many Bothnians died to bring us this information
Many Bothnians died to bring us this geological information
Thank you for this.
While that is an explanation for the islands of Sweden and Finland, it doesn't explain why Norway has so many aswell, since all of its islands are in the atlantic or arctic ocean.
The Scandinavian mountain range was there long before the ice ages, consisting of very hard gneiss and granites. It also flowed out west towards the North/Norwegian Sea. The glaciers would have carved out the rocks from between the existing mountains into fjords, leaving sections of harder rocks behind as islands.
You can see the same effect with the west coast of Scotland and British Columbia where glaciers flowed through coastal mountain ranges.
It sounds better to say I grew up in a temperate rain forest in a mountain valley at the head of fjord than it is to say I grew up in Squamish.
That's me hyping up my retail job on LinkedIn
Fjordlands are always packed with islands
You need to ask Slartibartfast, he's very proud of them.
Confirmed no need for me to write this.
Underrated.
Got an award for them.
The answer is still scouring ice sheets. Funnily enough the same is true in Canada, except because the ice sheet was across a continent raised a bit more above sea level, the question in Canada is ‘how are there sooooo many lakes?!’ have a look around the norther border of Saskatchewan and Manitoba with Nunavut and NWT, the lakes are crazy.
Finland and Sweden have lot of lakes and lot of islands in those. Also Norway has 65 000 lakes
How do glaciers depress land? Sorry I don’t know much about geology
They're heavy. Really, really heavy. And when we say glaciers here, really we're talking about an ice cap, miles deep.
It would be so weird to live in a time and when Ice caps were growing. Seeing them grow and move and crush everything in its path in slow motion.
You're seeing the opposite now
You can see it in action today by going to a border of a desert, looks unreal.
A mile thick ice caries a lot of weight
Glaciers are very heavy, and flow (albeit slowly compared to liquid water). In the process, they grind strongly on the surrounding rock, causing intense weathering. Really it's a matter of scale, when you have a layer of ice kilometres thick, that is a lot of mechanical energy...
And when you have an Ice Age, these glaciers can get, very, very big.
Its part of the same chain as the mountains in Oklahoma.
There aren't even that many islands. Like has OP ever seen a map of Canada?
If anything there's tons of islands because of repeated glaciation scouring away at any softer rocks and leaving only the toughest formations behind.
Canada has 52,455 islands. Sweden has 267,570, Norway 239,057, and Finland 178,947.
That's weird, I had always assumed it was something to do with being in such cold areas, because we see the same broken landscape across the top of Canada and Russia.
I used to play a lot of Worldle and you could always tell a cold water island from a warm water island just by shape. Are you saying this is mountain related rather than something specific to polar regions?
>showes picture without many islands
If you look closely there is lots of islands
They look pixelated
Look closer
I dunno, maybe ask Slartibartfast?
He won an award for that coastline
Master Fjordsman
Came here for this, well done.
He still cooking?
Great book.
Beat me to it
Am so happy to know this comment was made!
Shifting ice during iceages has made the terrain very uneven
Why am I seeing so many of these posts the last two days? Across multiple subreddits - “Scandinavia has the most islands.” I’m just curious, I’m not knocking this post or any of the others.
Likely op saw that post and was intrigued and wanted to find a reason why
Why not ask in that post? There's already going to be relevant discussion there.
This sub will know better than other ones
Citation needed
Is it even true? What about countries like Indonesia and the Philippines?
I'm checking Indonesia and Philippines in Google Maps, and I see mostly straight shorelines.
They are not rugged in the same way as the Scandinavian archipelagos, where you find thousands upon thousands of mostly very small islands, scattered in front of the greater landmasses.
Scandinavian countries also have very high number of lakes, which again contain a great number of small islands.
Oh yeah I must admit I was only thinking of islands in the sea.
The Philippines have 7100+ islands. Do Sweden/Finland have that many?
Sweden has the most islands in the world, a lot of them are really small but they still count, and less than 1000 are inhabited. In total Sweden have 267 570 islands, while Indonesia is only 6th place with 17 504 and Philippines at 8th place with 7641 islands
Someone sees it on one sub, reposts or posts something similar to another sub, cycle repeats.
All i can do is answer why im suddenly more interested than usual. The Disc Golf Pro Tour is currently in Scandinavia and been watching coverage from Norway this week.
See, during the ice age, glaciers moved around a lot - this already scoured the area quite a bit, but after they melted and unleashed a lot of water, a lot of land was simply eroded entirely, leaving behind only the sturdier rocks
So does that mean Russia and North America simply have "softer" rocks than Scandinavia?
I guess I phrased my question a bit wrong Why they have so many is not really what I'm curious about. There are a lot of explanations for that online, but what I don't understand is why it didn't happen anywhere else.
Yes for northwestern Russia.
The rocks that make up Fennoscandia is a block of very very hard continental crust consisting of igneous and metamorphic rocks called the Baltic Shield. This rock is exposed on the surface of Fennoscandia, but in Russia this block is underneath softer sedimentary rocks.
It's not just about rocks, but the terrain also. Mountainous places will suffer from this sort of erosion, meanwhile in flatter areas like Canada, Finland and Siberia it will just make a very messy landscape full of lakes and swamps. It depends on the height of the terrain compared to the sea level - if it's low, the water won't exactly rush down. Meanwhile in Norway, western Patagonia, and western Canada it was more like a constant flash flood that lasted for years.
And though fjords are blamed on glaciers themselves, glaciers on their own don't exactly "move" in a way where they would move a lot of matter (unless they break off from the main body, of course) - they're more like the threads of a tank or bulldozer - I remember a post somewhere on the internet where a man put an egg in front of one. Over time, the glacier moved over the egg, and when that part melted off, the egg was intact. So it's mostly rapid melting of the said glaciers that did that (and the end of the Ice Age was extremely sudden, the average temperature much hotter than today)
Mountain range of scandinavia that stretches down into the sea, is literally one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth, all the way back to Pangea era.
Suuuper primordial mountain ridge.
But the question is: why did that particularly happen here and not in other glacial areas?
Terrain, geology etc etc
Really clear, thanks.
*Fennoscandia
Finland is generally considered Nordic, but not Scandinavian. (Sorry, my danish ancestry is showing a bit.). But as you likely know, it ranks third in the number of islands after Sweden and Norway. So between Sweden and Finland, you have a truly massive island count due to the ground in the area still slowly rebounding since the last ice age. Over the next few millenia, the Baltic sea will slowly get even more shallow than it already is as the earth's crust rebounds further. Though this effect will be somewhat mitigated by sea level rise. The average depth of the Baltic sea is currently just ~54 meters. when this process is finished, there will be a lot fewer islands, and more coastal hills. Here's the Wikipedia article on post glacial rebound Finland gains about 7 square kilometers per year from this rebound.
Essentially, continental crust "floats" on the earth's mantle like an iceberg on water. When the added weight of thick ice sheets was placed on the earth, a good chunk of the continental crust was weighed down and sank a bit. Now that the ice is melted, the crust slowly rebounds. But since the mantle isn't liquid, it's more like cold taffy, this process is quite slow. Canada has a similar situation of slow rebound occurring. Also, as the whole Scandinavian peninsula is still rebounding, you get this occuring in Norway as well.
The heavy Scandinavian Mountains actually slow down this rebound process. Think what would rise up faster in water if you pulled it down and released it. A ping pong ball that floats really well, or a chunk of rubber that barely floats. But all this is happening slowly in geologic time. Think 1 cm per year. With possibly another 10,000 years of uplift before it's done. That 1 cm rate slowing down as it progresses. And the process is anything but uniform
I'm very surprised I had to scroll such a long way to find this answer. This is also what I was taught by my allknowing geography teacher
Me too, way too many non-answers, though I did appreciate the Bothnia and Yugothlavia joke.
Plus Denmark is part of Scandinavia and is a flat as a tack.
Mostly because the Gulf of Bothnia is incredibly shallow compared to the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
The number of islands depends on how you count them - how small can an island be and still be counted? Do freshwater islands count?
A consistent count across all countries would give you some different results, and Canada, US (Alaska), Chlle, Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark (Greenland) would have a lot of islands too You could even add outlying territories like Kerguelen, Falkland Islands, South Georgia, parts of Antarctica, as well as the Seattle and Murmansk areas. What do the areas have in common?
Glaciation during the last Ice Age.
Because Slartibartfast liked them.
He got an award for the fjords.
There are probably many different contributing factors, such as:
The Nordic region consists largely of very old igneous rocks that have had lots of time to fracture, weather and erode, creating lots of small valleys and bumps, that turn into vast archipelagos of mixed size islands when covered with water.
All the Nordic countries have fairly long, rocky and fractures coastlines making them very well suited to have many many islands. Had the coastlines been smooth and sandy, things would have looked very different.
The fact that the current landscape is quite young, having been completely covered by ice only some 10k+ years ago, which has left loads of lakes (about 100K of them in Sweden) that further boost the number of islands.
The Nordic countries are also quite obsessed with planning, mapping and resource inventory which lead to somebody actually bothering to count the number of islands. There are probably other countries that would find many more islands if they had the resources and will to count them all.
To get a better understanding of take a look at the fractured archipelagos along the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish coastlines, and then look at all the lakes in the inland on satellite maps. This will make the high number of islands seem a lot less surprising.
Why do the islands have so many Scandinavians?
They actually don't, by far most of them are not inhabited.
Because it's in their name. Wikipedia says they were originally called Skaðin-awjō, meaning danger islands.
Meanwhile Latvia, which is right next to Scandinavia, has zero :(
Baltic states don’t get to have as much fun as Scandinavian States.
Meanwhile Estonia still has over 2000 islands which is not too bad I guess :)
Glacial activities
My CPU and Graphics card are weeping.
Doesn't seem like a particularly demanding scene to render.
The answer; glaciers
That's not; how you use a semicolon.
Lol
We have to store all of our happiness