Along the northern part of the western coast of Sweden, the landscape is characterized by joint-aligned valleys with intervening rock hills. Precambrian bedrock is exposed over large areas and the Quaternary cover is mainly restricted to the bottom of narrow valleys. The well-exposed bedrock exhibits many glacial forms, but recently the major landforms have been interpreted as exhumed sub-Mesozoic etch forms. To gain insight into the relative roles of different processes in shaping the present forms, we studied a granite area where the rock hills contain fractures and narrow clefts with weathering forms and saprolite remnants. Marks of glacial erosion are found only in the upper parts of the clefts, where erosion by subglacial meltwater has exploited weathered preglacial sheeting structures to form furrows with concave cross profiles (p forms). On the summit surfaces, glacial erosion has been of greater importance, but the roche moutonnees found here are also structurally controlled. The main impact of glacial erosion is plucking on the order of tens of metres. Thus, landscapes labelled “areally scoured glacial terrain” can, at some locations, also be described as stripped and slightly incised etch surfaces.

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