Nordfjord, Norway
During breakfast this morning, following the spectacular valley of Nordfjord, we cruised deep into the heart of the Caledonian Mountains, a landscape carved from the granite and gneiss roots of those ancient peaks by glaciers now almost vanished. When we dropped our anchor at the head of one of the fjord’s long arms, the walls soared up around us on three sides like a flooded version of Yosemite Valley. High above, against the blue sky and snow white clouds, we could see the last tongue of ice remaining from the great frozen river that created this imposing scenery.
It was a great morning for adventuring of all kinds. Hikers, rock-scramblers, beach meadow strollers and photographers all went ashore to practice their chosen paces of perambulation. Kayaks glided out over the calm waters below the sweeping granite cliffs and Zodiac cruises made their way slowly along the shore, seeking songbirds in the birch forest and close up views of the crashing waterfalls.
Below the surface of the clear, calm waters lay another landscape of equal beauty, hidden from our eyes but revealed by the video camera on our deep-diving ROV. At recap this evening I showed the footage recorded two days earlier at the great fjord system of Tysfjord. Here we used our little robot submarine to explore the world of an enormous underwater cliff that plummets vertically from the surface to a depth of over 1700 feet. As we descended, vicariously in the comfort of National Geographic Explorer’s warm dry lounge, the bright sunlight of the surface faded slowly into twilight and then into the velvet-black everlasting night of the depths. Along the way we encountered many different denizens of the fjord, including beautiful anemones, scuttling squat lobsters, massive sponges and a cusk (a large member of the cod family) that tried to make a meal of our ROV!
Finally, 700 feet below the surface, we found what I most hoped that we might: several large reefs of Lophelia pertusa. This beautiful, delicate cold water coral forms a number of important reef structures in the deep waters along the Norwegian coast, but this was the first time we have ever been able to observe one with our ROV. Lophelia reefs are important habitat for many other marine species including fish like the Norway redfish, unusual squat lobsters, shrimp, clams and more. These fragile reef structures are threatened by trawling fisheries and are currently the subject an intensive conservation effort in Norway, the UK and other North Atlantic nations.
It was a marvelous day in a magical setting. Hiking and snacking on wild blueberries, kayaking cradled in the immense walls of granite and watching video from the ROV of the mysteries from the dark realms below, we felt that we had experienced the fjord as a whole, on many different levels, over, under and on the surface of Norway’s sunlit seas.
