"It's like being on the Moon!"

. . . said just about everyone about the terrain around Hamningberg.

Hamningberg is an abandoned fishing village in the northeast tip of eastern Finnmark--the northern part of Norway. The town was largely depopulated in the 1960s, although people still used some of the homes there as summer cottages. There was even a small coffee shop (or was, in 1993). What made the town special is that it is one of the few villages where buildings predate the war.

When the Germans retreated from Finnmark during the last winter of the war, they were ordered to burn everything. However (so I was told), the commander of the German forces stationed in Hamningberg took pity on the people, and so he disobeyed the order. This was probably made easier knowing that no other German units would be passing through to realize this. So while every other village in Finnmark was razed, Hamningberg remained.

 Things to do in town include visiting the abandoned German gun-emplacements, and, if you have a flashlight, the pillbox and the network of tunnels between ammunition storage areas, the observation area, and the rails for the gun.

WW2 vintage barbed wire

The picture quality isn't all that great--the slides look okay, but the scanner isn't doing a very good job of scanning them.

What I was most interested in seeing in the area was the landscape. Everyone I knew in Finnmark told me that going there was like going to the moon. Even this site describes it as a "moonscape".

Just for reference, here is a real moonscape.

The local geology around Hamningberg consists of alternating sequences of sandstone and shale, which have been folded so that the bedding is nearly vertical. The shale tends to get eroded out, but the more resistant sandstone beds remain as broken walls across the landscape. Craters are absent. So, the place doesn't look like the moon at all.

But there is something otherworldly about the place. I think the reason for this common description--like the surface of the moon--reflects the fact that the landscape looks radically different from any other landscape that most people have ever seen.

For one thing, there isn't a lot of vegetation. But (at least here in Canada), there are a lot of shield areas with practically no vegetation. The other reason has to do with the geometry of the landforms of the area.

In the early days of computer-generated landscapes, there were experiments in which people would be shown some of the simulations and asked to rate them as being realistic or not. Most of these landscapes were generated using simple rules, with a seed shape (usually a triangular pyramid) and a characteristic fractal dimension. It turns out people were remarkably good at picking out the landscapes which had fractal dimensions within the typical range of landscapes on earth. Anything outside of this range was "otherworldly".

For a computer-generated landscape to resemble Hamningberg, it may have to be seeded with rectangles rather than pyramids. I don't think the fractal dimension is anything unusual, however. But the description of the area is being otherworldly may reflect the preferences that people have for landscapes that conform to their ideas of what constitutes a "natural" landscape.