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An ambitious underwater road and rail tunnel is currently under construction in Europe that will link Germany and Denmark. Named the Fehmarnbelt tunnel, it will cross an 18-km (roughly 11.2-mile) stretch of the Baltic Sea. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel (aka Fehmarn Belt fixed link) is being created by Femern A/S, Rambøll, Arup and TEC, and is described by the team as the world's longest immersed tunnel (i.e. a tunnel built elsewhere and then sunk into place) and the world's deepest immersed tunnel with road and rail traffic. The immersed part is important as there are longer undersea tunnels, such as the...

the plan calls for something the world has never seen before: a submerged floating tunnel. "Wind, waves and currents have hardly any influence there," Arianna Minoretti, a chief engineer at Norway's Public Roads Administration, She said 50 international experts "are doing detailed simulations and detailed measurements of wind speed, current, undersea landslides, bedrock geology, etc." to make sure the plans, as well as the tunnel, is rooted in "the real-world environment."

Hundreds of years ago, Cistercian monks in France protected their treasured literary works with covers made from exotic animal skins, Science News reports. Clairvaux Abbey was founded in 1115 and its literary collection today contains over 1,000 medieval books. Most of these were wrapped with deer, sheep, or boar skin, but ancient DNA analysis of several perplexing furry volumes from the twelfth and thirteenth century revealed that they had been covered with seal hides. "I was like, 'that's not possible. There must be a mistake,'" said researcher Élodie Lévêque. "Seals didn't frequent France's northern coast at the time. I sent...

A more than 500-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Sweden isn't a Viking vessel after all, scientists have found.A 15th-century shipwreck off the coast of Sweden may be Scandinavia's oldest shipwreck built in the innovative "carvel" style — a design that gave it the strength to carry heavy cannons, archaeologists say.The wreck at Landfjärden, south of Stockholm, is one of five in the area that have been known since the 1800s. They were commonly thought to have been from ships dating to the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066).But last year, maritime archaeologists at Vrak, the museum of wrecks in...

Authorities in Denmark and Sweden are set to look into the viability of a new tunnel between Helsingør in Denmark and Helsingborg in Sweden. The mooted tunnel would bring a fast connection between the two cities, which are currently directly linked by ferry. Dubbed the HH connection, the new road link would be the second to connect the neighbouring Scandinavian countries after the Öresund bridge linking Copenhagen and Malmö, which opened in 2000. Denmark’s Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing will work with Swedish authorities on a strategic analysis of the viability of the project, the Danish ministry announced on...

The tunnel would sit about 100 feet below the surface of a fjord. Highway E39 in Norway is one of the most beautiful drives in the world, hugging the country's rugged west coast from Kristiansand to Trondheim. It is 684 miles of unending scenery, including rivers and lakes, waterfalls and mountains and numerous fjords. But if you look carefully at a road map, E39 is something of a dotted line. Each of the breaks occurs at seven fjords -- where drivers must put their cars on a ferry to get across. This stop-and-start, sea-and-land journey takes 21 hours. But the...

Common in the Middle Ages, palimpsests are works written on calf hide vellum pages, where the earlier ink has been scraped off and replaced with new writing. While some underlying text can occasionally be made out with the naked eye, technologies such as infrared bring to light words that were lost centuries ago...Iceland's connections to Scandinavia led to some of the most well-preserved information from the Viking Age, including an overview of Norway's royal lineage through the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184. The islands's ancient poets, known as Skalds, were highly sought after across the Norse world. Norwegian...

Recent research by Dr. Mikael Fauvelle and his colleagues, published in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, proposes that the neolithic Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) may have used skin boats to conduct trade, travel, fishing, and hunting activities.The PWC was a neolithic culture that had migrated from the East during the Early and Middle Neolithic. They settled in what is modern-day Scandinavia around 3500–2300 BCE. This hunter-gatherer culture was named after the pottery they produced, which was characteristically decorated with deep pits along its circumference.The Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) was unusual among European marine-specialized hunter-gatherer groups. While other such groups gradually...

Bernie Sanders has single-handedly brought the term “democratic socialism” into the contemporary American political lexicon and shaken millions of Millennials out of their apathy towards politics. Even if he does not win the Democratic nomination, his impact on American politics will be evident for years to come.Sanders has convinced a great number of people that things have been going very badly for the great majority of people in the United States, for a very long time. His solution? America must embrace “democratic socialism,” a socioeconomic system that seemingly works very well in the Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, which are, by...

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

Sometimes it takes a punch to the gut or a slap in the face. For many “civilized” people the instinct is to deescalate, to appease an adversary, based on the belief that civilized people do their best to avoid fights. It’s a tactic that is smart when dealing with other civilized people. Generally speaking, fighting is a losing proposition, and if you can resolve a dispute by talking and compromise the chances that the costs of compromise will be lower than the costs of fighting are high. But this instinct is wrong, even stupid when dealing with uncivilized people. Their...

The University of Helsinki announced Monday the institution will confer climate change activist Greta Thunberg with an honorary Doctorate of Theology. In its news release, the Finland-based university called the honorary degree its “highest recognition,” and 20-year-old Thunberg of Sweden is one of 30 individuals set to be honored as part of the school’s annual graduation ceremonies this May. The announcement came just one day before a Swedish court gave Thunberg and hundreds of other climate activists approval “to proceed with a class action lawsuit against the Swedish state for ‘insufficient climate policy,'” Reuters reported. “Thunberg, and 600 other young...

A nine-year-old Swedish girl was the victim of a brutal murder attempt at a playground in the Swedish industrial town of Skellefteå. A 13-year-old Ethiopian boy, already notorious in the community, has been accused of the crime by local police. The little girl remains in a coma, with photos released by the family showing her surrounded by stuffed animals in a local hospital bed. The teen suspect, who was granted permanent residence status just a week before the attack, beat the young girl at 5:30 p.m. last Thursday at the Morö Backe school. Police and emergency services arrived on scene...

Man lying on his belly with another man using a weapon on his back. (Stora Hammar Stone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Hammars_stones#/media/File:Sacrificial_scene_on_Hammars_(II).png Famed for their swift longboats and bloody incursions, Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. Between the eighth and 11th centuries, these groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe. Particularly infamous is the so-called "blood eagle", a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim's back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....

Finland has joined Sweden, Denmark and Norway in either banning or discouraging young adults or teens from getting the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, because of the increased risk of myocarditis — heart inflammation.Dr. Hanna Nohynek, chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, had told the media a decision was coming down Thursday. Finland's health authorities announced that men under 30 will not get the Moderna shot, and should get the Pfizer vaccine instead. Sweden banned Moderna for people under the age of 30, and Denmark did the same for people under 18. Instead of issuing a ban, Norway...

A significant new find of golden artifacts, many of them with runes in the Elder Futhark, has been uncovered in Denmark.Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus.Major New Runes Find in Denmark | Jackson Crawford | September 15, 2021

(...) Denmark, Norway and Iceland have temporarily suspended the use of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine over concerns about patients developing post-jab blood clots, as the manufacturer and the European Medicines Agency insisted the vaccine was safe. The EMA said that information available so far indicated the risk of blood clots in those vaccinated against the coronavirus was "no higher than that seen in the general population." It also said that European countries could keep using the AstraZeneca vaccine while the issue was investigated, concluding that "the vaccine's benefits continue to outweigh its risks". Denmark, the first to announce it was suspending...

Americans, especially young, left-leaning Americans don’t have much of a conception of the reality of socialism. They have some idea that it means the government taxing the wealthy and providing “free” (read: taxpayer-funded) services to those that are left fortunate. That is completely wrong. In fact, it’s a semi-rosy view of how the Nordic welfare systems work, and those aren’t even socialist systems in the first place. Plus, they tax everyone quite heavily, not just the upper class; the average tax in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is between 40% and 60%, but it is a more or less flat tax....

On this date in 1854, two Sami men were beheaded for Norway’s Kautokeino Rebellion. The indigenous Sami people — often known as Lapps, although this nomenclature is not preferred by the Sami themselves — had by this point become territorially assimilated to the states of the Scandinavian peninsula across which their ancestral homeland had once spanned. The material benefits of this association for the Sami were much less apparent. In Norway — our focus for this post — Sami shared little of the economic growth in the 19th century save for a startling proliferation of alcoholism. In the 1840s a...