Northern Europe: Fjords, Forests and Rising Land

Northern Europe was covered by vast ice sheets during the last ice age, and their legacy shapes the region. Glaciers carved deep U-shaped valleys along Norway's coast that the sea later flooded, creating fjords such as the Sognefjord, which stretches about 200 kilometres inland. Ice also scraped away soil from much of Finland and Sweden, leaving thin soils, countless lakes and huge forests; Finland is roughly three-quarters forest.

Freed of the ice's weight, the land around the Gulf of Bothnia is still rising by up to about a centimetre a year, adding new land along the coast. Northern Europe also shows how geography can become an energy advantage. Iceland, on a plate boundary, heats about nine in ten homes with geothermal water, while Norway produces around nine-tenths of its electricity from hydropower and has earned large revenues from North Sea oil and gas since the Ekofisk discovery in 1969.