48 Fun Facts About Fjords

Which comedy troupe's pet-shop sketch insists that a dead parrot is merely 'pining for the fjords'?

Monty Python. The joke outlived the bird: when a 55-million-year-old Danish fossil was described as a parrot in 2008, the lead scientist ruled out any pining, because Norway's fjords were carved by ice less than a million years ago.

Without its fjords, how long would Norway's roughly 29,000 km coastline be?

2,500 km. That is a straight baseline; trace every fjord and bay and Norway's statisticians get about 29,000 km, because a coast grows longer the finer the ruler used to measure it.

What shape of valley does a glacier carve, which later becomes a fjord?

U-shaped. A river cuts only at its bed and leaves a V, but a glacier fills the valley and grinds the floor and walls together; side valleys are left hanging high above, which is why fjords are lined with waterfalls.

What is the shallow rock bar across most fjord mouths called, a name borrowed from part of a doorway?

A sill or threshold. The glacier lost its bite where it spread out near the coast, and the bar it left can seal in the deep water: in some fjords it is renewed so rarely that the oxygen runs out and the bottom turns foul.

The Bay of Kotor in Montenegro is often called a fjord but is actually what?

A ria, a drowned river valley. No glacier carved it, and the river that did has vanished into the limestone: only after heavy rain does a spring burst from the cliff at Risan and fall straight into the bay.

Which author created Slartibartfast, a planet designer who won an award for shaping Norway's fjords?

Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy his weary craftsman is woken from a five-million-year sleep to help build a replacement Earth, and when handed Africa he gives it fjords too.

Which habitat thrives in cold darkness on the floors of some Norwegian fjords?

Coral reefs. Unlike their tropical cousins these corals need no sunlight, sifting plankton from the current instead, and Norwegian fishermen knew of them for centuries before submersibles showed how vast they are.

Which Alaskan city is the closest to Tracy Arm, an Inside Passage fjord that ends at the twin Sawyer Glaciers?

Juneau. Tour boats weave through the fjord's floating ice all summer, and early one August morning in 2025 a mountainside beside the South Sawyer Glacier collapsed, throwing water almost 500 metres up the opposite wall.

Which Scottish word for an estuary, as on the Forth, Clyde and Moray, comes from the same root as 'fjord'?

Firth. Both words go back to an ancient root meaning 'to cross', which also gave English ford, ferry and fare, so a fjord was first of all a passage, a way through by boat.

Whose word for a sea inlet ends the Irish town names Wexford and Waterford?

The Vikings. They founded both towns, and the '-ford' is no river crossing but Old Norse fjǫrðr, a fjord: Wexford's first name, Veisafjǫrðr, is usually read as 'inlet of the mudflats'.

Norway's Sognefjord reaches roughly what depth below sea level?

About 1,300 m. The deepest soundings lie not at the sea but far up the fjord, where the ice was thickest and ground hardest, and the floor actually rises again towards the ocean.

Which nickname does the Sognefjord carry as Norway's longest and deepest fjord?

King of the Fjords. It runs about 205 km inland, yet ships enter over a rock step only 100 to 200 m down, far shallower than the basin behind it, which lies deeper than the sea outside.

Among mainland Europe's glaciers, Jostedalsbreen above the inner Sognefjord holds which record?

Largest. Yet it is no relic of the Ice Age: it probably melted away entirely several thousand years ago, and its oldest ice is thought to be only a millennium or two old.

Which status did Norway's Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord jointly earn in 2005?

World Heritage Site. UNESCO listed the pair together, although they lie 120 km apart, as the archetypal fjord landscape, among the longest, deepest and most scenically outstanding anywhere.

How wide is the Nærøyfjord at its narrowest point?

About 250 m. When winter ice stopped the mail boats on the old Bergen to Oslo post road, carriers walked the shore path and then crossed the frozen fjord on the ice here, at its narrowest point.

Which waterfall faces the Seven Sisters directly across the Geirangerfjord?

The Suitor. Legend says he proposed to each of the Seven Sisters across the water, was turned down every time and took to drink, which is why his waterfall is shaped like a bottle.

Which 2015 Norwegian disaster film is set in the fjord village of Geiranger?

The Wave. The threat is real: a crack in the nearby mountain Åkerneset widens by several centimetres each year, so geologists monitor it constantly to warn Geiranger before any flood wave.

Which nickname have the Hardangerfjord's mild, sheltered slopes earned?

The fruit orchard of Norway. The county around it has long led the country in apples, plums and sweet cherries, and the blossom on the fjordside each spring draws visitors of its own.

Preikestolen, the flat-topped Pulpit Rock near Stavanger, juts out 604 m above which Norwegian fjord?

Lysefjord. The cliff's flat top is only about 25 m square, and Tom Cruise dangled from its edge in the finale of Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

Hikers climb to Kjeragbolten, almost 1,000 m above a Norwegian fjord, to be photographed standing on what?

A wedged boulder. A melting glacier left the five-cubic-metre rock jammed in a crevice, and walkers can step onto it without any climbing gear above a 984 m drop.

Which Norwegian coastal service has carried post and passengers between remote ports since 1893?

Hurtigruten. The 'fast route' sailed on through the night: a pilot's notebook of compass courses and timings let Captain Richard With thread the dark, poorly charted coast.

Which Norwegian railway, one of Europe's steepest on ordinary rails, drops 865 m in 20 km to reach the Sognefjord?

Flåm Line. With gradients of up to 5.5 percent, the hour-long ride down from Myrdal on the Oslo to Bergen main line sheds its height through some 20 tunnels, one of them a horseshoe bend inside the mountain.

What happened in the Oslofjord's Drøbak narrows in April 1940?

The sinking of the German cruiser Blücher. Old guns and torpedoes at Oscarsborg fortress sent the invasion flagship down, and the delay let the king, government and parliament get out of Oslo before the Germans arrived.

Norway's third-longest fjord, at about 130 km, shares its name with which city?

Trondheim. Just off its harbour lies Munkholmen, an islet that has served as an execution ground, a monastery, a fortress and a prison, and is now where the city goes to swim.

Narvik, the Ofotfjord port fought over in 1940, was built to export what from Sweden?

Iron ore. A railway over the mountains carries it from the Kiruna mines to Narvik's ice-free harbour, which is why both sides raced for this small Arctic town in April 1940.

Hornindalsvatnet in western Norway, a fjord-like lake gouged out by a glacier, holds what record?

Europe's deepest lake. It goes down 514 m although its surface lies only 53 m above the sea, so the bed sits some 460 m below sea level, a fjord in everything but salt water.

The Norwegian Fjord horse always comes in shades of which pale colour?

Dun. All five recognised shades are duns, and the mane is kept short so that it stands upright and shows off the stripe of dark hair running down its centre between pale edges.

Nansen Sound, Greely Fiord and Tanquary Fiord form a fjord chain cutting deep into Nunavut's Ellesmere Island in which country?

Canada. A Norwegian expedition under Otto Sverdrup charted these waters around 1900, and Norway kept a claim to the islands just west of Ellesmere for almost three decades before conceding them.

Norway's Lærdal road tunnel, built to replace a fjord ferry, holds which world record?

Longest. At 24.5 km the drive takes about 20 minutes, so its builders blasted out caverns with special lighting along the way to break the monotony and keep drivers alert.

Scoresby Sund, widely called the world's largest fjord system, cuts into the east coast of which island?

Greenland. Ittoqqortoormiit, the town at its mouth, was planted there by Denmark, which settled hunting families on the fjord partly to mark its sovereignty over the east coast.

Ilulissat, an Arctic town beside a glacier-fed fjord, has a name meaning what?

Icebergs. The glacier calves so many that the biggest, too deep-keeled to clear a bank at the fjord mouth, run aground there and jam the whole fjord until they break up.

Which writer is said to have called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world?

Rudyard Kipling. He toured New Zealand in 1891 and it plainly left him smitten: he went on to hail Auckland in verse as 'last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart'.

Milford Sound in Fiordland holds which New Zealand record?

Wettest inhabited place. More than six metres of rain falls in an average year, so a downpour is the show: the waterfalls are at their best on wet days, and many of them exist only then.

The sealing captain who named New Zealand's Milford Sound was honouring Milford Haven, a harbour in which country?

Wales. John Grono actually called the fiord Milford Haven, after the harbour back home, and it was a later captain, John Lort Stokes, who changed it to Milford Sound.

Which explorer named Doubtful Sound in 1770, doubting the wind would let him sail back out?

James Cook. He never risked going in, fearing the westerly wind would pin his ship inside, and sailed on up the coast; visitors still cannot drive to the deepest of New Zealand's fiords.

Which flightless bird, thought extinct for fifty years, was found alive in New Zealand's Fiordland in 1948?

Takahē. Geoffrey Orbell, an Invercargill doctor, found the last wild birds in tussock high above Lake Te Anau, and birds bred from them now live on predator-free islands around New Zealand.

Roughly half of Alaska's Kenai Fjords National Park, named for its glacier-carved inlets, is covered by what?

Ice. The Harding Icefield buries the Kenai Mountains so deeply that only lone peaks, called nunataks, poke through, and more than 30 glaciers spill from it towards the fjords they carved.

The Sea-to-Sky Highway follows the fjord of Howe Sound north from Vancouver before climbing to which ski resort?

Whistler. The road was rebuilt for the 2010 Winter Olympics; on the way it passes Britannia Beach, once the largest copper mine in the British Empire and now a museum beside the UNESCO-listed sound.

Which great inlet of Washington State did George Vancouver name in 1792 after one of his lieutenants?

Puget Sound. Vancouver named nearly everything in sight for friends, patrons and shipmates: Lieutenant Peter Puget got the sound, and ship's master Joseph Whidbey the big island he sailed right around.

Killary Harbour, a mussel-farming inlet beneath Connacht's highest mountain, is often billed as the only fjord in which country?

Ireland. Killary runs 16 km inland between Mayo and Galway, but the 'only fjord' billing is contested, since some counts make it one of three alongside Lough Swilly and Carlingford Lough.

The Westfjords, a fjord-cut peninsula whose main town is Ísafjörður, make up the remote northwest corner of which country?

Iceland. About one in seven of the country's people lived in the Westfjords in 1920, but under 2 percent do today, after a century of out-migration from an already thinly peopled region.

Which country's maze of fjords and channels runs from Puerto Montt south to Cape Horn?

Chile. Its southern fjords were home to the Kawésqar and Yaghan, canoe nomads who lived on shellfish and sea mammals and kept a fire burning in the boat as they travelled.

Which Scottish fjord, or sea loch, lent its name to an oyster farm and a restaurant chain?

Loch Fyne. Its herring was famous long before a landowner and a marine biologist began farming oysters there in the late 1970s, and the name later spread to restaurants across Britain.

An 1825 storm surge broke through a sand spit and opened Denmark's Limfjord to which sea?

North Sea. The breach at Agger Tange cut the northern tip of Jutland off as an island, so the Limfjord is technically a sound rather than a fjord, and that island is now Denmark's second-largest after Zealand.

Which Norwegian word names the belt of islands sheltering the coast's inner shipping lanes?

Skjærgård. The belt shields most of the coast, and at the unsheltered Stad peninsula the open sea is rough enough that Norway has long planned a ship tunnel through the rock.

Whale-watchers gather at Tadoussac, where Quebec's Saguenay Fjord empties not into the open sea but into which river?

St. Lawrence. Cold salt water slides into the fjord beneath its fresh surface layer, and the krill-rich mixing zone at the mouth draws belugas, fin whales and even blue whales.

Which pair of Norwegian place names both end in an Old Norse word for a fjord or inlet?

Hardanger and Stavanger. Both end in Old Norse angr, and each name began on the water, Hardanger as the fjord itself and Stavanger probably as its harbour inlet, before moving ashore.

Which Māori name for Milford Sound, now part of the fiord's official dual name, recalls a lone bird of legend?

Piopiotahi. It means 'a single piopio', after a thrush-like bird, now extinct, said to have flown to the fiord in mourning in a legend tied to the demigod Māui.