Orrestranda

Norway has a lot of coastline, most of which is steep and rocky, so I went into this trip knowing beaches would be scarce. One area where sandy beaches are more common is along the Jæren Coast, south of Stavanger, where a broad area of the coast is relatively low and marked by cultivated fields, not fjords and mountains (they're still there, just a few tens of miles farther inland). Like the south end of the Lista Peninsula (previous post) this area may be an old moraine.

AERIAL VIEW

The shoreline consists of sandy beaches, segmented by low headlands. The headlands, at least in this area, appear to consist of cobble and boulder lags, consistent with the moraine idea. The day was damp and windy, so my visit to this beach was brief. Apparently, there are also some nice coarse gravel and cobble beaches along this coast - but none that I saw. Maybe next trip.

Traveling north, we skirted the Stavanger airport and the huge oil field supply center at Tananger. I made due note of the large Schlumberger complex, a nod to a much older epoch of my geologic history (albeit in the Williston Basin, not the North Sea). Our day ended on an island north of Stavanger, reached by a series of deep undersea tunnels -- another chapter in Norway's engineering geology story.