Today it might be rather difficult to imagine that there was once a sheet of ice 1.000 meters thick burying this area. But if you look closer at hills and water inlets around here it might be easier to imagine how a a gigantic plough of massive ice has turned everything upside down, unloading an enormous amount of rubble and thus reshaping the landscape as we know it today.
The landscape in this whole region was formed by an enormous ice stream which started its most recent invasion roughly 24.000 years ago. It came and went with several advances culminating around 18.000 years ago.
What happened when the glaciers retreated back North?
The ice in the Als area vanished between 8.000 and 9.000 years ago. Soon thereafter primitive vegetation conquered the land, luring robust animals like the woolly mammoth to the scene. With the loss of the massive icy burden the land slowly rose up over the sea, only to be flooded again shortly after that when a rapid melting of ice masses took place on a global scale. Some experts think that this relatively sudden rise in sea level of 25 to 30 meters (!) is the true source of the great flood myths which are a common folklore of many cultures.
Did you know?
There have been periods in the earth's history where there was practically no ice, not even at the poles - this was the case 25 million years back.