fjord

fjord

, fiord

(esp on the coast of Norway) a long narrow inlet of the sea between high steep cliffs formed by glacial action

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

fjord

[fyȯrd]

(geography)

A narrow, deep inlet of the sea between high cliffs or steep slopes. Also spelled fiord.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Fjord

 

a narrow, winding, deep inlet in a mountainous coast. Its length is often dozens of times greater than its width. The sides of fjords are steep, even vertical, becoming less steep in the upper walls; the floor is highly irregular. The longest known fjord, Sognafjorden, is 204 km long, 1.5–6 km wide, and up to 1,208 m deep. Fjords are often separated from the open sea by a sill. They represent ancient erosion or tectonic valleys that underwent scouring by mountain glaciers, which deepened the floor, and that were subsequently inundated by postglacial transgression. Fjords are found only at high latitudes where Pleistocene glaciers formed or modern glaciers exist; they are found on the coasts of Norway, Spitsbergen, Greenland, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Novaia Zemlia, Taimyr, the Chukchi Peninsula, New Zealand, and Patagonia.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.