Sweden is dotted with islands - about 270,000 of them, more than any other country on Earth. Most are tiny, uninhabited rocks scattered across the cold Baltic Sea. The Stockholm Archipelago alone contains around 24,000 islands clustered close to the capital.
All those islands are leftovers of the last ice age. As glaciers ground their way across Scandinavia they scraped the landscape full of hollows, then melted and flooded them. The bumpy bits that didn’t sink became today’s islands.
The Earth is actually still bouncing back up after losing the weight of all that ice. Sweden’s coastline rises by about a centimetre every year, which means tiny new islands keep popping up out of the sea - and old shallow channels keep closing into land bridges.
