Maine and Switzerland

We've just returned from driving 1,000 miles of the Maine coastline, taking every road with a sign that ended with Point, Harbor, Bay, Port, or Marina, just to see what was there. The last major North American glaciation submerged Maine under perhaps 8,000 feet of ice moving south. The bottom of that ice contained many rocks, which ground great grooves into the remnants of once proud mountains that rivaled the Swiss Alps today. Now absent the great weight of ice, the coast of Maine slowly rises and reveals the ice-polished folds of ancient layered sea floor. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
At the end of Bailey's Island, Maine, the vertical seams and polished rock clearly show the effects of thousands of years of moving ice and rebounding land.
Long ago Maine supported high mountains also found today in the Alps, which young mountains were created by Italy's collision with Europe. That collision also folded ancient sea floor rocks into similar formations as we see in Maine. However, the Alps have not been ground down to bedrock by great glaciers, yet. To see the similarity between Maine's coast and the Alps, one must explore deep alpine valleys, such as the Val Verzasca just north of Lago Maggiore in northern Italy, where rivers rather than ice have cut down to the ancient, folded seafloor rocks, now many miles away from the sea.