Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Landscapes & National
Parks
Norway's geographical facts tell quite a story. The Norwegian mainland
stretches 2518km from Lindesnes in the south to Nordkapp in the Arctic
North with a narrowest point of 6.3km wide. Norway also has the highest
mountains in northern Europe and the fourth largest landmass in Western
Europe (behind France, Spain and Sweden). But these are merely the statist-
ical signposts to the staggering diversity of Norwegian landforms, from
glacier-strewn high country and plunging fjords to the tundralike plains of
the Arctic North.
The Coast
Seeming to wrap itself around Scandinavia like a protective shield from the freezing Arctic,
Norway's coastline appears to have shattered under the strain, riven as it is with islands and
fjords cutting deep fissures inland. Geologists believe that the islands along Norway's far
northern coast were once attached to the North American crustal plate - such is their re-
semblance to the landforms of eastern Greenland. Further north, Svalbard is geologically in-
dependent of the rest of Europe and sits on the Barents continental plate deep in the polar
region.
In the North Sea lie two rift valleys that contain upper Jurassic shale bearing the extra-
vagantly rich deposits of oil and gas.
Geological history can seem to move at a speed indiscernible to the human eye, but Nor-
way's coastline remains in a state of flux. In the early 1990s, Blomstrandhalvøya in north-
western Svalbard ceased to be a peninsula and became an island.
