Qualla: Sulitjelma Glacier

Sulitjelma Glacier: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sweden's largest glacier lies mostly in Norway. That is not a trick of wording. The Sulitjelma Glacier covers about 24 square kilometres on the Sulitjelma massif, and the Norway–Sweden border cuts across it, leaving the greater share on the Norwegian side; but the piece that spills east is still, taken as part of the whole, the biggest single body of ice Sweden has. Which country you say it belongs to depends entirely on where you decide the glacier stops — and glaciers, unhelpfully, do not stop anywhere in particular.

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Sulitjelma Glacier: Three Names for One Sheet of Ice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Norwegians call it Sulitjelmaisen, after the massif and the mining village below. Swedes call it Salajekna. In Lule Sami it is Sállajiegŋa — the name the other two are ultimately borrowed from, since almost every deep-map name in this country came out of Sami first and was writte...

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Sulitjelma Glacier: 830 to 1,680

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The glacier's highest ice reaches 1,680 metres above sea level and its lowest tongue comes down to 830 — an 850-metre span, and around 300 metres of thickness at its deepest. It drapes the flanks of a massif whose summit, Suliskongen, stands higher still at 1,908 metres, so the i...

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Sulitjelma Glacier: The Station at the Front

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Near the glacier front, Stockholm University runs an automatic weather station. It is a small installation in an empty place, and it exists because a glacier is one of the few landscape features that keeps its own records. Snowfall, temperature, wind and radiation at the front ar...

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Sulitjelma Glacier: The Village Below the Ice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Downhill and west, the village of Sulitjelma sits at 140 metres above sea level on the shore of Langvatnet, about 470 people in a place that once held nearly 3,000. It grew because of copper and pyrite in the rock and shrank when the mines closed in 1991, and it lives now within ...

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