Fjord

Fjord Latest News

A massive 500-meter megatsunami, the second-tallest ever recorded, recently struck Alaska’s Tracy Arm Fjord after a landslide dumped 64 million cubic meters of rock into the water.

About Fjord

• A fjord is a long, narrow, deep body of water that stretches far inland from the coast.  
• A fjord was formed when a glacier made a U-shaped valley by segregation through several ice ages . 
• The valley was then filled with water from the sea once the glaciers melted  . 
• The opening toward the sea is called the mouth of the fjord, and is often shallow. 
• The fjords can be long and quite deep and often surrounded by high mountains. 
• Typically, fjords reach their greatest depths farther inland, where the force of the glacier that formed them was the most potent. 
• Many fjords are actually deeper than the sea that feeds into it. The deepest fjords are up to 6300 feet (nearly 2000 m) deep. 
• Some features of fjords include coral reefs and rocky islands called skerries.
• Epishelf Lakes:
  • Another feature of some fjords is the presence of epishelf lakes. These lakes occur when melted fresh water becomes trapped under a floating ice shelf.
  • This freshwater does not mix with the saltwater below, but rather floats on top of it.
• Fjords are found mainly in Norway, Chile, New Zealand, Canada, Greenland, and the U.S. state of Alaska.
• Sognefjorden, a fjord in Norway, is more than 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) long.

Source: WION

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