Random Fjord Name Generator

How this random fjord generator works

Press Generate and you get a fjord and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes the lot.

Sognefjord. Geirangerfjord. Nærøyfjord. Hardangerfjord. Aurlandsfjord. Lysefjord. Scoresby Sund. Kenai Fjords.

And Milford Sound, which is a fjord, and has never once been called one on a chart.

The most famous fjord in the world is called a Sound

A sound is a valley that a river carved, which the sea later flooded. It tends to be broad, with gently sloping sides, because rivers cut V-shaped valleys and then wander about widening them.

A fjord is a valley that a glacier carved, which the sea later flooded. It is steep, narrow and startlingly deep, because a glacier is a solid object. It grinds the valley into a U and gouges the floor far below sea level as it goes.

Milford Sound is the second kind. Ice came down out of the Southern Alps over roughly a dozen glacial phases, cut a trench through solid rock, and left. The sea came in. The walls rise more than a kilometre out of the water.

The name is a European mistake. The men who charted that coast were sailors, not geologists, and it looked to them like the inlets they knew at home. They called it a sound and the name stuck, the way names do.

So the most famous fjord in the southern hemisphere is misfiled, permanently, on every map on Earth, and nobody is going to fix it.

How to tell a fjord from a sound without leaving the boat

There is a tell, and it is a beautiful one.

A glacier carries rubble. When it stops advancing and starts melting back, it dumps that rubble in a heap at the point where it stopped. The heap is called a terminal moraine, and in a fjord it lies across the mouth like a doorstep. Hydrographers call it a sill.

So the depth profile of a fjord is upside down from what you would expect. Shallow at the entrance, deep inside.

At Milford Sound the floor at the mouth is around 27 metres deep. A little further in it drops past 300. You could stand a fourteen-storey building on the sill and it would break the surface. Sail two minutes further and the same building would vanish.

A river-carved sound does the opposite. It deepens towards the sea, because that is the direction the water was flowing when it did the cutting.

Shallow at the door, deep in the room, means a glacier stood there. Nothing else does that.

A fjord is not a shape. It is a history.

This is where almost everybody goes wrong, and it is the same mistake the sailors made.

Look at a map and a fjord announces itself: narrow, coastal, water between two walls of land, dramatic. Then look at the Bocas del Toro Archipelago in Panama, which is also narrow, coastal, and dramatic. Panama is nine degrees north of the equator. There has never been a glacier within a thousand miles of it.

Narrow does not make a fjord. Coastal does not make a fjord. Dramatic certainly does not.

A fjord is the specific mark left by a specific object, and the object is ice. If the ice was never there, the inlet is something else no matter what it looks like from a boat. The Bay of Fundy is famous for tides. Bass Strait is a strait. Akaroa Harbour in New Zealand is a drowned volcano. All three would pass a shape test. None of them was carved by a glacier.

Which is why the sill matters. It is not a rule of thumb. It is the glacier's signature, left behind at the door, and it is the only evidence that survives after the ice has gone.

A map of the world's fjords is a map of the last ice age's coastline. Norway. Greenland. Iceland. Chile. Alaska. British Columbia. The south west of New Zealand. It is not a map of Panama.

A country that named a region after its own apology

New Zealand has fourteen or fifteen true fjords. Almost none of them is called a fjord. They are Sounds and Inlets and Arms, because that is what the charts said, and charts are hard to change.

So instead of renaming fourteen inlets, New Zealand renamed the entire region. The area containing them is Fiordland, and Fiordland National Park sits inside a UNESCO World Heritage area. The country could not correct the names, so it corrected the map around them.

Note the spelling. New Zealand writes fiord, without the J. Norway, which supplied the word, writes fjord. The world uses both.

The word itself is Old Norse and it is a cousin of "ford" and "ferry". It meant something closer to "the place where you cross" than "the deep thing you sail up". Norway named its fjords after the crossing, not the chasm.

Ways people actually use this

• Travel shortlists. Some of the most dramatic coastline on the planet, one click at a time.
• Geography teaching. Generate five and ask what carved each one. Then ask how you would check.
• Quizzes. Show the fjord, ask for the country. Scoresby Sund will not be guessed.
• Worldbuilding. Fjords mean glaciers, which mean latitude, which means everything else about your climate.
• Applying the sill test. Look up the depth profile of whatever you generate. The doorstep is usually there in the chart.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "Name, Country", so Contains works as a country filter. Try Norway, Greenland, Chile, Alaska.
• Type fjord into Contains, then look at what does not come back. Those are the ones wearing a different word.
• Type Sound and apply the sill test to each one.
• Ends with ignores the country and reads the last letter of the fjord's own name. Type d and you get the ones that end in "fjord".

Questions people ask

What is the difference between a fjord and a sound?

What carved it. A fjord is a glacial valley flooded by the sea: steep, narrow, very deep, with a shallow sill of glacial rubble at its mouth. A sound is a river valley flooded by the sea: broader, gentler, and deeper towards the open water.

Is Milford Sound a fjord?

Yes. It was carved by glaciers and named by sailors who assumed otherwise. The surrounding region is called Fiordland, which is the closest thing to an official correction that exists.

Why are fjords so deep?

Because a glacier is heavy and does not float. It keeps grinding downward well below the level the sea will later reach. Many fjords are hundreds of metres deeper inside than at their entrance.

Is it fjord or fiord?

Both. Fjord is the Norwegian spelling and the international standard. Fiord is the New Zealand one. The word is Old Norse and shares a root with "ford".

Where are the world's fjords?

Wherever ice sheets reached the sea: Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Chile, Alaska, British Columbia, and New Zealand's south west. A map of the world's fjords is a map of the last ice age's coastline.

References

1. Milford Sound geography
2. Milford Sound, Britannica
3. Milford Sound