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Ground up bedrock in the Valen Fault, seen under a microscope.

The Valen Fault

04.01.2019 - 12:59

A rainy day at the Fish market, in the 1930s. (Alf Adriansen)

Bergen- Rain City

05.12.2018 - 09:21

"With its strange situation (surrounded by high mountains), this city has the advantage of a beautiful port and considerable shipping, but also the disadvantage that once on land one cannot get to the city without great inconvenience. This is because the weather in the vicinity of these high mountains is extremely unpleasant and rainy. There has even evolved an expression that is always rains in Bergen, and we have not experienced anything to counteract this saying." (a quote by the Dutch professor Fabricius after a visit to Bergen in ca. 1780).

Gjønavatnet and Kikedalen

Gjønavatnet and Kikedalen

16.06.2018 - 14:03

On the trail toward Kyrkjedøri, a half hour walk from Finse station, we find these small ridges

Trail toward Kyrkjedøri

04.12.2018 - 15:04

Roughly 550 million years ago, what is now Finse lay at the bottom of the sea - the remains of mud and clay that were deposited in this sea have ended up on the roofs of Norway. Also the thrust sheet from the continental collision has found its way to Finse, after a several hundred kilometre-long, trek through the mountains, that took several tens of millions of years to complete.

The saw tooth pattern is clearly visible from Skora Mountain southwards toward Tellnes and Skogsvågen.

Haganes

12.06.2018 - 19:59

The gneiss landscape west and north of Bergen viewed in profile can remind us of a saw blade of the kind that has long, slanted sides that get broken off shorter transverse sides. It has taken several hundred million years to file this saw blade, an enduring interplay between various geological processes.

Fantasy drawing of the animal life that reigned when the Bjorøy layer was deposited during the younger part of the Jurassic Period.

Vatlestraumen

12.06.2018 - 20:06

There are coal bits hidden in the sand under Vatlestraumen. These remains from a geological layer from the Jurassic Period were discovered when the undersea Bjorøy Tunnel was built in 1994. Oil- and gas reservoirs in the Troll Field in the sea west of Hordaland are from the same time. It is, nonetheless, quite surprising to find bedrock from dinosaur time inside of the outer islands of western Norway. On the Scandinavian mainland north of Denmark, there are only a very few places where one f inds rock from this time in earth history.

From Kvitingen nature preserve.

Kvitingen

16.06.2018 - 17:26

Few other places in Hordaland, or even the whole country, get as much rain as in the Samnanger mountains. The mountains here simply attract wetness. The weather station on Kvitingen has continuous measurements all the way back to 1900, and the measurements have documented several records for the county. The station is therefore much used as a reference for the rainfall in western Norway.

Holmengrå

Holmengrå

07.12.2018 - 12:45

Holmengrå is the only place in Hordaland where we find traces of the abrasion that is supposed to have transformed Western Norway from a Himalaya-like high mountain landscape during the earth's Paleozoic Era, to a flat lowlands terrain during the Mezosoic Era. Just 400 million years ago, large and small stones plummeted down from the high mountains. Some of these stones became incorporated into the conglomerate bedrock on Holmengrå.

Romarheimsdalen

Romarheimsdalen

29.03.2018 - 11:38

The geology along Oster Fjord and further eastward, in cross-section and on the surface. (Haakon Fossen)

Stall

11.12.2018 - 14:43

The Bergen Arcs have an unusually sharp boundary to the bedrock in the east. Geologists think that this was caused by movements in the earth's crust during the Devonian Period. Then, the Bergen Arcs on the Lindås peninsula sank a whole 10 kilometres in relation to the Precambrian basement gneisses on the east side of Fens Fjord and Aust Fjord.

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