More than ten thousand years ago, at the height of the Ice Age, the weight of a layer of ice several kilometers thick pushed the earth's crust down by up to a kilometer. Since then, the land has slowly recovered to its original level and will continue to do so for at least ten thousand years. The Kvarken Archipelago on the northwest coast of Finland is the best place in the world to experience this extraordinary land uplift first hand. The country is rising from the sea at a rapid pace – about nine millimeters per year. Given the already shallow depth of the lagoons that separate the archipelago's thousands of islands and islets, this natural rise can completely change the landscape in the course of a human lifetime. Abandoned boathouses that were still in the water a few decades ago now lie strangely high and dry. Due to the special character of this unique landscape, the Kvarken archipelago forms a shared UNESCO World Heritage Site with the Swedish high coast just west of the Gulf of Bothnia, which experiences the same phenomenon.