Qualla: Okstindbreen https://qualla.com/okstindbreen en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Okstindbreen https://qualla.com/okstindbreen Okstindbreen: Introduction https://qualla.com/okstindbreen/ Photo credit LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two surveys, ten years apart, contain the whole story. In 2012 Okstindbreen covered 53.6 square kilometres. In 2022 it covered 36.9. Nearly a third of the ice — 16.7 square kilometres of it, an area larger than most cities' downtowns — simply was not there any more. This is the eighth-largest glacier on mainland Norway, the frozen heart of the Okstindan range in Nordland, and it is not a remnant clinging to a shaded gully. It is a full ice field, spilling between 1,900-metre summits and reaching down to 750 metres, and it is going fast enough that the change registers between one decade's map and the next.

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Image: LukeTriton | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/u7dp-okstindbreen-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Okstindbreen: One Ice Field, Seven Names https://qualla.com/okstindbreen/ Photo credit LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Okstindbreen is a collective noun as much as a place. The ice field carries seven named parts — Vestisen, Vestre Okstindbreen, Austre Okstindbreen, Bessedørbreen, Steikvassbreen, Vestre Svartfjellbreen and Oksfjellbreen — because it does not behave as one body. It fills the high ...

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Image: LukeTriton | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/u7dp-okstindbreen-one-ice-field-seven-names.mp3 0:06 2 full Okstindbreen: A Glacier With a Long Memory https://qualla.com/okstindbreen/ Photo credit LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Austre Okstindbreen is among the better-studied glaciers in northern Scandinavia, and researchers have reconstructed a complete record of its behaviour across the Holocene — the roughly 11,700 years since the last ice age ended. That record matters because it establishes what nor...

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Image: LukeTriton | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/u7dp-okstindbreen-a-glacier-with-a-long-memory.mp3 0:06 3 full Okstindbreen: The Largest of Many https://qualla.com/okstindbreen/ Photo credit LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0. Okstindbreen is the biggest of numerous glaciers scattered through the Okstindan area, and the others are the more vulnerable for being small. A large ice field has depth and thermal inertia on its side; a two-square-kilometre patch of ice under a north-facing wall has neither. W...

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Image: LukeTriton | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/u7dp-okstindbreen-the-largest-of-many.mp3 0:06 4 full Okstindbreen: Seeing It https://qualla.com/okstindbreen/ Photo credit LukeTriton, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the Swedish fells east of the border, Okstindan reads as a pale interruption in an otherwise brown-and-grey horizon, and the pallor is this ice. From the air the shape is clearer: a white lobed mass draped over high ground, with arms running down into the valleys and dark ri...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/7/d/p/okstindbreen-wp/u7dp-okstindbreen-seeing-it.mp3 0:06 5 full