What is a Fjord?
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.
- 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.
- Some features of fjords include coral reefs and rocky islands called skerries.
- 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.
