The Ground Beneath You Is Rising Up

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The ground in Scandinavia is literally bouncing back up at 8 mm every single year and it's cracking ancient faults that could trigger earthquakes across the entire region. During the last ice age, 3 km of glacial ice sat on top of Fennoscandia. That's the combined weight of Sweden [music] and Finland crushed down for thousands of years. When that ice melted, the earth didn't just bounce back immediately. It's still rebounding.

[00:00:22][music] This process is called glacial isostatic adjustment and it's actively reshaping the entire landscape [music] right now.

[00:00:30]Rivers in Sweden are literally reversing their flow because the land is tilting upward faster in the north than the south.

[00:00:37]The Baltic Sea is being [music] tilted like a bathtub that someone's tilting on one end. You can actually see the coastline shifting. Land that was underwater is now dry ground, but here's where it gets alarming.

[00:00:49]As the weight of that ice lifts off, it's decompressing faults that haven't ruptured in 10,000 [music] years. During the last deglaciation, when this process was happening much faster, it triggered massive earthquakes. Scientists are now monitoring whether we could see that happen again. The ground is still waking up.