An Old, Old Beach

I’ve mentioned before that I’m using lunchtime walks from work to visit places I’ve never been before, even though they are very close. This time I was walking up Beacon Hill (Vårdkasen), a place I have been many times but I took a footpath I’d never used before and followed it around and eventually up the hill.
This fossilised shingle beach was about 8 minutes walk from the top and part of a nature reserve, actually the “beach” is the reason for the reserve. I didn’t even know it existed until I stumbled upon it today.
In the distance you can see today’s sea, a couple of kilometres away and 150 meters lower down. When the icecap that covered this area melted about 9600 years ago the sea was 285 meters deeper than it is now, or to put it another way, the land was 285 meters lower than it now is!
The land has been bouncing back up ever since, at first quite quickly but now it’s slowed to just 1 cm a year. Even at this “slow” speed it is faster than anywhere else in the world.  Around 7000 years ago the sea level was just here and formed the beach we can still see. We are looking at the back of a ridge formed by a big storm at the top of the beach. You can see the same thing after a storm on any shingle beach today. But then the land carried on rising and the sea never came back, and this ridge has been sitting there ever since.
If this text seems a little familiar you probably saw a blip from August 29, 2014, showing another example of this phenomena.