Sorry for the blogging hiatus. We have a lot to write, but decided that instead of spending a perfectly nice month in front of our computer, we'd enjoy our vacation, the city and most importantly our time with our guests.
I have been told that this July has been pretty hot for a Swedish summer. We've had two straight weeks of sustained temperatures between 75 and 80. 80 is a little hot, but really, it's almost perfect. There was one hot day that I broke down and bought a stylish tank-top. Not the typical white one that the overly macho American men choose to wear, but a black one with grey horizontal stripes. Very European in look and cut. I'm a little reluctant to wear the shirt, even if they're common here. But when I gain a little more confidence, or when the temperature passes 80 again, I'll bust it out in no time.
Some of the last few posts have mentioned the archipelago. I don't know how much detail I've provided on the archipelago, so sorry if I bore you with a repeat description, but it's pretty important to the city of Stockholm and will certainly be mentioned again, so here's the story...Stockholm is built on a group of islands where a large inland lake flows into the Baltic Sea. An archipelago is a group of islands clustered together, and Stockholm has such clusters, one small group to the west in Lake Mälaren, and one big one to the east in the Baltic Sea. I've read different promotional literature mentioning between 24,000 and 30,000 different islands in the two archipelagos. We've enjoyed a few trips out in the Baltic to some nearby islands when we were invited to the cabins of two of my coworkers, but got a much better chance to see more of the islands when we hopped a cruise to Finland. Most of the islands are tiny. Some just a few rocks sticking out of the water. Most are big enough for a few houses to a few hundred tightly-packed houses, and the largest islands have small cities that may or may not be connected to the mainland by bridge.
Personally, I find the islands fascinating. It's a good thing that Luther didn't offer a major in geology, otherwise I might have dropped my math/stats major and spent my life doing something most people consider even more boring than mysterious actuarial work: looking at rocks. Yep, it's true, I really am that big of a nerd.
Prepare yourself, because I'm about to share my excitement with all of you. I could spend hours just looking at the islands. My second trip among the islands I noticed that on most of the islands the rock met the water and the bottom continued to plunge deep to the point that you couldn't even see the bottom just a few feet from the shore. There were few shallow shores. Most of the islands are hard rock too, so you don't see much sand or dirt beaches...things you'd expect to see on shores that have formed from thousands upon thousands of years of waves lapping against the rock. This seemed a little suspect, so I did my research. Turns out that as late as the Viking Age (1,000 A.D.), the thousands of islands to the east of Stockholm were still under water. Now some of the islands tower to 100 feet above water. Think about that, in the course of a thousand and eight years, 20,000+ islands have risen out of the water! I know that no man can truly appreciate that in his lifetime, but it just blows my mind how dynamic our world can be. Does that mean that as the land continues to rise that the lake to the west will someday rise so high as to completely drain itself into the Baltic? Or maybe the islands in Stockholm will rise high enough to stop the water flowing from Lake Mälaren to the Baltic?
Cruising among the islands almost felt like somebody had flooded the Appalachian Mountains to the point that only the worn and rounded peaks were sticking out of the water. You could even see where different islands were grouped together like mountain ridges. I truly believe that if the water were to recede you'd have a beautifully old mountain range with deep valleys and weather-worn peaks. I dug further in my research to figure out how these were formed and found that it was the work of the glaciers (go figure). But unlike the glaciers that flattened Minnesota and inland Sweden, these glaciers didn't level out the land when they retreated. Instead, their weight was so heavy that the land below was pressed towards the earth's core. The molten part of the earth's mantle was squeezed out until the land could sink no further. After the glaciers retreated, the magma started to slowly return underneath the earth's crust, pushing it upwards, causing land to very slowly rise from the sea. I guess the land is still rising about one centimeter a year, causing lake front property to retreat from the shores, Viking-era fishing villages to lie hundreds of meters inland, and new islands to form every year.
To bring this closer to home, the same thing is happening along Lake Superior. The Canadian shore is slowly rising and the U.S. shore is slowly sinking. Maybe in another 1,000 years the town of Superior, Wisconsin, will be completely under water.
To wrap it all up, the archipelago is Stockholm's playground. Everyone appreciates it for different reasons. Mostly for the beauty and the boating and camping opportunities, but there are also nerds like me who appreciate it just because it exists.
I have been told that this July has been pretty hot for a Swedish summer. We've had two straight weeks of sustained temperatures between 75 and 80. 80 is a little hot, but really, it's almost perfect. There was one hot day that I broke down and bought a stylish tank-top. Not the typical white one that the overly macho American men choose to wear, but a black one with grey horizontal stripes. Very European in look and cut. I'm a little reluctant to wear the shirt, even if they're common here. But when I gain a little more confidence, or when the temperature passes 80 again, I'll bust it out in no time.
Some of the last few posts have mentioned the archipelago. I don't know how much detail I've provided on the archipelago, so sorry if I bore you with a repeat description, but it's pretty important to the city of Stockholm and will certainly be mentioned again, so here's the story...Stockholm is built on a group of islands where a large inland lake flows into the Baltic Sea. An archipelago is a group of islands clustered together, and Stockholm has such clusters, one small group to the west in Lake Mälaren, and one big one to the east in the Baltic Sea. I've read different promotional literature mentioning between 24,000 and 30,000 different islands in the two archipelagos. We've enjoyed a few trips out in the Baltic to some nearby islands when we were invited to the cabins of two of my coworkers, but got a much better chance to see more of the islands when we hopped a cruise to Finland. Most of the islands are tiny. Some just a few rocks sticking out of the water. Most are big enough for a few houses to a few hundred tightly-packed houses, and the largest islands have small cities that may or may not be connected to the mainland by bridge.
Personally, I find the islands fascinating. It's a good thing that Luther didn't offer a major in geology, otherwise I might have dropped my math/stats major and spent my life doing something most people consider even more boring than mysterious actuarial work: looking at rocks. Yep, it's true, I really am that big of a nerd.
Prepare yourself, because I'm about to share my excitement with all of you. I could spend hours just looking at the islands. My second trip among the islands I noticed that on most of the islands the rock met the water and the bottom continued to plunge deep to the point that you couldn't even see the bottom just a few feet from the shore. There were few shallow shores. Most of the islands are hard rock too, so you don't see much sand or dirt beaches...things you'd expect to see on shores that have formed from thousands upon thousands of years of waves lapping against the rock. This seemed a little suspect, so I did my research. Turns out that as late as the Viking Age (1,000 A.D.), the thousands of islands to the east of Stockholm were still under water. Now some of the islands tower to 100 feet above water. Think about that, in the course of a thousand and eight years, 20,000+ islands have risen out of the water! I know that no man can truly appreciate that in his lifetime, but it just blows my mind how dynamic our world can be. Does that mean that as the land continues to rise that the lake to the west will someday rise so high as to completely drain itself into the Baltic? Or maybe the islands in Stockholm will rise high enough to stop the water flowing from Lake Mälaren to the Baltic?
Cruising among the islands almost felt like somebody had flooded the Appalachian Mountains to the point that only the worn and rounded peaks were sticking out of the water. You could even see where different islands were grouped together like mountain ridges. I truly believe that if the water were to recede you'd have a beautifully old mountain range with deep valleys and weather-worn peaks. I dug further in my research to figure out how these were formed and found that it was the work of the glaciers (go figure). But unlike the glaciers that flattened Minnesota and inland Sweden, these glaciers didn't level out the land when they retreated. Instead, their weight was so heavy that the land below was pressed towards the earth's core. The molten part of the earth's mantle was squeezed out until the land could sink no further. After the glaciers retreated, the magma started to slowly return underneath the earth's crust, pushing it upwards, causing land to very slowly rise from the sea. I guess the land is still rising about one centimeter a year, causing lake front property to retreat from the shores, Viking-era fishing villages to lie hundreds of meters inland, and new islands to form every year.
To bring this closer to home, the same thing is happening along Lake Superior. The Canadian shore is slowly rising and the U.S. shore is slowly sinking. Maybe in another 1,000 years the town of Superior, Wisconsin, will be completely under water.
To wrap it all up, the archipelago is Stockholm's playground. Everyone appreciates it for different reasons. Mostly for the beauty and the boating and camping opportunities, but there are also nerds like me who appreciate it just because it exists.
1 comment:
This short video is for you Scott.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3njjD41f48
Don't you remember something very similar happening when you arrived at Luther??
I salute you for being proud of your dorkiness.
Sincerely, a fellow Nerd
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