Danish straits, fjords and seas, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 3 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Denmark guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 14 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

North Sea

The Danish North Sea coast is about 500 kilometers of sand, dune and wind, with almost no natural harbor on it, which is why Esbjerg had to be dug. Denmark has produced oil and gas from its own sector since 1972, and the world’s first offshore wind farm was built at Vindeby in 1991. The sea is shallow, mostly under a hundred meters, and it was dry land walked by people until about 6,000 BC.

Skagerrak

The Skagerrak is the deep end of the passage out to the North Sea, dropping to some 700 meters in the Norwegian Trench, and its water is properly salty in a way the Baltic never is. It meets the Kattegat at Grenen, the spit above Skagen, where the two currents run visibly into each other. The largest naval battle of the First World War was fought at its mouth in 1916, which is why German accounts call it the Skagerrakschlacht and British ones the Battle of Jutland.

Kattegat

The Kattegat is the middle room between the Baltic and the North Sea, shallow and rarely more than about eighty meters, and the place where fresh water flowing out meets salt water flowing in. That layering is part of why its deeper water loses oxygen in summer. The name is old Dutch for cat’s throat, from a passage so narrow a cat would struggle through it, which is roughly what it felt like to sailors coming down from the Skagerrak.

Baltic Sea

The Baltic is the largest body of brackish water in the world. Something like two hundred rivers empty into it and its only way out is past Denmark, so its water is a fraction as salty as the ocean, and it freezes in a hard winter. Shipworm cannot live in water that fresh, which is why wooden wrecks survive on its floor in a way they do not anywhere else.

Øresund

The Sound is about four kilometers across at its narrowest and one of the busiest waterways in the world. The Sound Dues, charged on every passing ship from 1429 until 1857 and collected under the guns of Kronborg, were for a long time the largest single source of Danish crown revenue. The bridge and tunnel opened on 1 July 2000, sixteen kilometers in all, and about 20,000 people now cross it to work each day.

Great Belt

Storebælt is the deepest and busiest of the three ways out of the Baltic, and every ship too large for the Sound uses it. Until 1998 crossing it meant an hour on a ferry. The East Bridge that replaced them has a main span of 1,624 meters, which was the longest of any suspension bridge in the world when it opened, and the trains go under the water rather than over it, through a tunnel finished the year before.

Little Belt

Lillebælt is the narrowest of the three, about 700 meters across at Middelfart, and also the deepest, dropping to around eighty meters where the current has scoured it. That current is why porpoises gather here in the greatest numbers anywhere in the world, and why the town had a licensed whale hunt until 1902. Two bridges cross it, one from 1935 and one from 1970.

Fehmarn Belt

The Fehmarn Belt is eighteen kilometers of water between Lolland and Fehmarn, and it is being closed. The tunnel under it, dug since 2020 as sections cast on shore and sunk into a trench, will be the longest immersed tunnel in the world when it opens, and will put Copenhagen about two and a half hours from Hamburg by train. Until then the crossing is the ferry from Rødbyhavn to Puttgarden.

Limfjord

The Limfjord is a sound rather than a fjord: it cuts clean through Jutland, so everything north of it is an island. It has not always been open at both ends. The western outlet silted up in the Middle Ages and stayed shut until a storm broke through the Agger isthmus in 1825, after which the fjord turned salty and the freshwater fish in it died. Its oysters are the only wild European flat oysters left being fished commercially in the country.

Wadden Sea

The Wadden Sea is the largest unbroken system of tidal flats in the world, running from the Netherlands to Denmark, and the Danish part joined the World Heritage list in 2014. Twice a day the sea goes out and leaves a plain you can walk to the islands across. Ten to twelve million migrating birds pass through in a year, and in spring the starlings gather over the marshes in flocks so dense the Danes call it the black sun.

Ringkøbing Fjord

Ringkøbing Fjord is a lagoon of about 300 square kilometers, cut off from the North Sea by Holmsland Klit, a strip of dune barely a kilometer wide. Its opening used to wander up and down the coast with the sand until a channel was cut at Hvide Sande in 1931 with a sluice on it, and the salinity of the whole lagoon has been set by hand ever since.

Isefjord

The Isefjord is the larger of the two inlets on the north coast of Zealand and shares its mouth with the other one. It is shallow, mostly under ten meters, and warm enough in summer for the eelgrass beds the fjord is known for. Orø, the island in the middle of it, has a few hundred residents and no bridge, and Denmark’s first industrial ironworks was set up at Frederiksværk on its eastern shore in the 1750s.

Roskilde Fjord

Roskilde Fjord is about 40 kilometers long and rarely more than a few meters deep, which is exactly why five ships were filled with stones and sunk across the narrows at Skuldelev around 1070: the channel is the only way in, and blocking it shut the door on Roskilde. The ships came up in 1962 and are in the museum on the water. Frederiksborg and Jægerspris both stand on the fjord.

Arresø

Arresø is the largest lake in Denmark at about 40 square kilometers, and one of the shallowest of that size anywhere: its deepest point is under six meters, so the whole thing warms up and stirs in a wind. It had no outlet worth the name until a canal was dug to Frederiksværk in the 1710s to power the ironworks there, and it has drained that way ever since.

How this one works

The other maps of Denmark

Sweden has the same map in Swedish waters. India has the same map in Indian waters. Mexico has the same map in Mexican waters. United States has the same map in American waters. China has the same map in Chinese waters. Turkey has the same map in Turkish waters. France has the same map in French waters. Japan has the same map in Japanese waters. Germany has the same map in German waters. Spain has the same map in Spanish waters. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian waters. United Kingdom has the same map in British waters. Italy has the same map in Italian waters. South Korea has the same map in Korean waters. All three together on the Denmark atlas page, the country itself on the Denmark guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.