What does Vattaja have in common with Svalbard?
When a community of living organisms develops in a completely new environment, this is known as primary succession. Along the land uplift coast, this new environment is created as land emerges from the sea for the first time since the last Ice Age. During the Ice Age, an enormous ice sheet, more than two kilometres thick, pressed the Earth’s crust down by almost one kilometre. Towards the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, the ice sheet retreated and the land began to rise back to its original shape. Even today, the land here is still rising by eight millimetres a year, revealing new land from beneath the water.
As the land rises above sea level, vegetation begins to grow on it. The first to colonise the land are the coastal meadow plants. As the land rises higher and becomes more distant from the shoreline, shrubs appear. The shrub stage is followed by deciduous trees, and finally by conifers.
There are only a few places in the world where land is still rising as it does here along the coast of the Bothnian Bay. What these areas have in common is that they were once covered by ice sheets. Besides the Bothnian Bay, such areas include Svalbard and Hudson Bay in Canada.