Scandinavia is still rising after shedding four kilometres of ice
During the Ice Ages nearly four kilometres of ice pressed the Scandinavian Peninsula down into the Earth's crust. Since the ice melted, the land has been springing back at about a metre per century, while regions to the south sink in compensation. The same glaciers carved Norway's fjords and scraped away much of the soil.
Covering the mainland of Sweden and Norway plus a slice of north-western Finland, the peninsula is Europe's largest, bigger than the Balkan, Iberian or Italian peninsulas. It runs about 1,850 kilometres long and between roughly 370 and 805 kilometres wide, with a quarter of it above the Arctic Circle; the northernmost point is Cape Nordkinn in Norway. The Scandinavian mountains largely mark the Norway–Sweden border. The top spot used to be Glittertinden, until melting of its summit glacier handed the title to Galdhøpiggen at 2,469 metres.
The bedrock belongs to the Baltic Shield, ancient crystalline rock that glaciers stripped almost bare, especially in the north. That leaves little arable land, most of it in the south, where the population and the biggest cities, led by Stockholm and Oslo, are concentrated. Bare rock also exposed ores. Iron in north-western Sweden was valuable enough that a nineteenth-century railway was pushed through otherwise railless mountains to the Norwegian port of Narvik, so ore could be shipped abroad for smelting. In the south, glaciers dumped chaotic heaps of moraine; the whole of Denmark is covered by them.
The name comes from Scania, the southern tip of the peninsula, for centuries Danish, ancestral home of the Danes and now part of Sweden. People reached the south about 12,000 years ago, following reindeer across the tundra left by retreating ice. Hunter-gatherers lived there from around 8200 BC until farming arrived about 3200 BC. The Sámi, whose languages belong to the Uralic family alongside Finnish and Estonian, arrived in the north and centre thousands of years later.
Borders came surprisingly late. Sweden and Norway only fixed their frontier in 1751, the Finnish–Norwegian line was settled in 1809, and shared Norwegian–Russian districts were divided in 1826. Norway, long tied to Denmark and then Sweden, gained full independence in 1905.
Source: Scandinavian Peninsula
