Teardrop-shaped drumlines
Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (1840-1905): Lake landscape (30x49.5 cm), Ateneum Art Museum. Photo: Finnish National Gallery.
Hjalmar Munsterhjelm’s Lake landscape may be the rare exception in which drumlin is depicted in landscape painting!
When the Salpausselkä’s were formed about 12,300-11,600 years ago at the edge of the continental glacier, streamlined and often teardrop-shaped moraine ridges called drumlins formed beneath it.
Classical drumlins have a rock core behind which the moraine is deposited as a long ridge. Such a rock-core drumlin is along the Kitulanlenkki in the Saimaa seal trail.
In the Hjalmar Munsterhjelm’s Lake landscape painting, the back of the drumlin is slightly sloping from the right edge of the painting to the left edge. The glacier has thus flowed from right to left in the landscape of the painting and the rock head of the drumlin remains outside the right edge of the work.
