Møns Klint is a six-kilometre wall of white chalk standing up to 128 metres straight out of the Baltic. The water at its foot runs pale turquoise, and that is the cliff's doing: fine white particles wash off the face, hang in the shallows and scatter the light back at you. From the crest, beech trees lean out over the drop and the sea goes from turquoise to deep blue within a few hundred metres. To reach the foot you take the Maglevandstrappen, at 497 steps the longest staircase in Denmark, down through the forest to a shore of pebbles and flint. Down there the cliff turns silent and sheer above you. The chalk is the compressed remains of microscopic algae that sank to the floor of a warm sea about 70 million years ago.
An ice sheet stood those flat layers on end. Near the close of the last glaciation, ice pushing in from the Baltic struck the old seabed and shoved it, folding it, slicing it and driving it upward until parts of it now stand almost vertical. Few cliffs anywhere show that process so plainly, which is why geologists come for the wall itself rather than the view from the top of it. Walk the shore and look up instead of out. Where the chalk lies in level bands it sits as the seabed left it; where the bands buckle, tilt and cut out against each other, the ice had hold of them. The cliff has not finished moving, either. A storm surge in October 2023 wrecked all five beach staircases, and landslides in January 2024 carried away stretches of the clifftop path. Three of the stairs are open again, and the one at Røde Udfald is not due back until 2028. The white face you photograph from the beach is the same face that keeps arriving on it.