They are huge rocky valleys flooded by the sea, formations that appear on the coast of countries generally neighboring the south and north poles. “The dimensions of the fjords are impressive. Some exceed 350 kilometers in length, have walls over a thousand meters high and a submerged part of almost 1,500 meters deep”, says glaciologist Jefferson Cardia Simões, from UFRGS and the Brazilian Antarctic Program (Proantar). These curious formations were created by the action of ice in the glacial ages, in the last 3 million years. During these periods, the Earth’s temperature dropped, glaciers expanded, and the average level of the oceans dropped. Sheets of ice measuring more than a million square kilometers were advancing over warmer regions, digging into the surface they glided on.
It was more or less like the waters of a river flowing in a valley, except with one important difference: the action of the ice is much more violent. “In the so-called glacial erosion, the ice drags what it finds in front of it, pulling out pieces of rock. The result is narrow valleys with very steep walls, like those that characterize fjords,” says Jefferson. At the end of the ice ages, the temperature rose again, the ice retreated and the sea level rose, flooding the rocky valleys. As the occurrence of fjords is related to the advance of glaciers, most of them appear in regions at high latitudes, closer to Antarctica or the Arctic, such as the coast of Norway, the coast of Alaska, Greenland, Canada and New Zealand . In addition to forming breathtaking landscapes, the very calm waters of these channels are excellent for fishing and offer a good place for anchoring boats, as the very origin of the word reveals: in Norwegian, fjord means something like “safe harbor”. .
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