Understand
Once weighed down by immensely heavy glaciers that melted after the end of the Ice Age, the Kvarken area is undergoing extremely fast uplift by geological standards, with land rising about 8 mm per year — enough to create 1 square kilometer of new land every year.
Landscape
The archipelago consists of some 6,550 islands. The largest of them, Replot Raippaluoto, is Finland's 8th largest and houses the vast majority of the islands' population of some 2,500 people, but it's just outside the official World Heritage Site area.