Classroom lesson · The fjords of Norway · 🇳🇴 Norway

The fjords of Norway

Deep, narrow sea valleys carved by giant rivers of ice

Geirangerfjord, with steep cliffs plunging down into deep blue water

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

A fjord is a long, narrow finger of seawater that reaches inland between steep cliffs. Norway's coast has over 1,000 of them. The most famous are Geirangerfjord and Sognefjord, where the cliffs rise straight up out of the water for more than a kilometre.

Tell me more

Fjords were made by glaciers - huge, slow rivers of ice. During the last Ice Age, thick sheets of ice covered Norway. As the ice slid down towards the sea, it scraped out deep, U-shaped valleys in the rock. When the ice melted, the sea flowed in and filled them up. The result: a fjord.

Sognefjord, the king of Norwegian fjords, is over 200 kilometres long. That is longer than the distance from London to Manchester. At its deepest, it is 1,308 metres deep - deep enough to hide three Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other.

Tiny villages cling to the strips of flat land at the foot of the cliffs. Many of them can only be reached by boat or by a winding road carved into the rock. Waterfalls tumble down the cliffs - sometimes hundreds of them in a single fjord after heavy rain.

Geirangerfjord is so beautiful that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site - protected for everyone in the world to enjoy. Cruise ships sail right up the middle, and the passengers stare up at cliffs that look like they were drawn by a giant.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01How could a river of ice carve out a valley deep enough to drown a mountain in?
  2. 02What would daily life feel like if the only way to reach your village was a boat?
  3. 03Waterfalls tumble down fjord cliffs after rain. Where else does water travel through your landscape?
Try this

Classroom activity

Take a tray of damp sand. Press an ice cube down hard and drag it slowly across the sand. Look at the U-shaped groove it leaves. Now imagine that ice cube was a kilometre thick and made the whole valley. Draw your own fjord in cross-section, with cliffs, water and a tiny village at the bottom.