page_title: Western Norway
section_title: Geology
hierarchical_section_title: Western Norway / Geography / Geology
caption_attribution_description: English: Birds on the island of Herdla in Askøy, Norway
context_page_description: Western Norway is the region along the Atlantic coast of southern Norway. It consists of the counties Rogaland, Vestland and Møre og Romsdal. The region has a population of approximately 1.3 million people. The largest city is Bergen and the second-largest is Stavanger. Historically the regions of Agder, Vest-Telemark, Hallingdal, Valdres and northern parts of Gudbrandsdal have been included in Western Norway.
  Western Norway, as well as other parts of historical regions of Norway, shares a common history with Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Iceland and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Britain. For example, the Icelandic horse is a close relative of the Fjord horse and both the Faroese and Icelandic languages are based on the Old West Norse.
  In early Norse times, people from Western Norway became settlers at the Western Isles in the Northern Atlantic, so that Orkney, Shetland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. During the Viking Age settlements were made at the Hebrides, Man and Ireland proper.
  In early modern time, Western Norway has had much emigration to the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent to the United Kingdom.
context_section_description: The fjords of western Norway formed in connection to the east-ward tilting of much of Norway during the Cenozoic uplift of the Scandinavian Mountains. This uplift, that occurred long before the Quaternary glaciations, enabled rivers to incise deeply the Paleic relief. A study of Sognefjord suggest that the fluvial and glacial erosion that made the fjords has followed structural weaknesses in the crust. The headvalleys in particular seem to located at structural weakness zones. Western Norway bears some resemblance to other passive margins at lower latitudes like eastern Australia. In both cases a table land is dissected by valleys forming a great escarpment. The main differences is that in Norway valley and fjord bottoms have been widened by glacier erosion, valley sides steepened, and the outer regions of valleys straightened, also by glacier erosion.
  The deglaciation patterns of the Bergen and Nordfjord–Sunnmøre areas in western Norway are described and correlated. In the Bergen area the coast was first deglaciated at 12,600 B.P., with a succeeding re-advance into the North Sea around 12,200 B.P. Later, during the Allerød, the inland ice retreated at least 50 km, but nearly reached the sea again during the Younger Dryas re-advance, ending at 10,000 B.P. Sunnmøre was ice-free during an interstadial 28,000–38,000 B.P. Later the inland ice reached the sea. The final deglaciation is poorly dated in Sunnmøre, while further south in Nordfjord, it started slightly before 12,300 B.P., followed by a major retreat. No large re-advance of the inland ice occurred during the Younger Dryas. However, in the Sunnmøre–Nordfjord area many local glaciers formed outside the inland ice during the Younger Dryas. Limnic sediments outside one such cirque glacier have been cored and dated, proving that the glacier did not exist at 12,300–11,000 B.P., and that it was formed and disappeared in the time interval 11,000–10,000 B.P. (Younger Dryas). The erosion rate of the cirque glacier was 0.9 mm/year.
caption: The nature reserve at the island of Herdla has many birds. Some 220 species of birds are registered.
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