Nordic lands are rising, growing

Uplift larger than sea-level increase

LULEA, Sweden — A Stone Agecampthat used to be by the shore is now 125 miles from the Baltic Sea. Sheep graze on what was the seabed in the 15th century. And the Swedish port of Lulea risks getting too shallow for ships.

In contrast to worries from the Maldives to Manhattan of storm surges and higher ocean levels caused by climate change, the northern part of Scandinavia is rising and, as a result, the Baltic Sea is receding.

“In a way we’re lucky,” said Lena Bengten, environmental strategist at the Lulea municipality in Sweden, pointing to damage from superstorm Sandy that killed more than 200 people from Haiti to the U.S.

The uplift of almost 0.4 inch a year, one of the highest rates in the world, is part of a continuing geological rebound since the end of the ice age removed a vast ice sheet from regions around the Arctic Circle.

“It’s a bit like a foam rubber mattress. It takes a while to return to normal after you get up,” said Martin Vermeer, a professor of geodesy at Aalto University in Finland.

Finland gains 2.7 square miles a year as the land rises.

In the Lulea region just south of the Arctic Circle, mostly flat with pine forests and where the sea freezes in winter, tracts of land have emerged, with some Stone Age, Viking and medieval sites uncovered.

That puts human settlements gradually out of harm’s way from sea flooding. Facebook is investing in a new data center in Lulea on land that was once under the sea.

But rising land also means costs. Lulea is planning to deepen its port by 2020 to let in bigger ships and offset land rise at a cost of nearly $240 million.

“Even if we didn’t have the ambition to have larger ships, we would still have to do it on a smaller scale just to compensate for the land rise,” said Roger Danell, head of the port.

Away from the sea about 125 miles inland, archaeologists recently found a 10,700-year-old Stone Age hunters’ camp near Pajala that was originally by the Ancylus Lake, the forerunner of the Baltic Sea.

“We carbon-dated burned bones from a fireplace,” said archaeologist Olof Ostlund at the Norrbottens museum. The hunters would have been near the retreating ice sheet that was once almost two miles thick. Experts examined sediments that showed the camp was on the shore of the former giant lake.

Lulea’s old town, with a 15th-century church and bright red-painted wooden houses, was originally built on an island when it was as an outpost of the then Swedish-Finnish Kingdom to counter Russian influence near the Arctic Circle.

Now the village is high and dry. Sheep graze on a field in what used to be the port.

In one spot, Sweden’s coastline has risen about 325 yards since the ice age ended10,000 years ago.