The Arctic Auditorium

At the rock formation just up from the shore, rises a wall of different types of clearly stratified rocks. Foto: Guri Gunnes Oppegård

The course is held on Svalbard and takes place over 12 days in August.

The students are based in the field and they work in multidisciplinary groups whose members have backgrounds in geology, geophysics and petroleum technology.

Text and photo: Guri Gunnes Oppegård

Svalex offers the world’s most spectacular field studies course in geology.

At the rock formation just up from the shore, rises a wall of different types of clearly stratified rocks. The smell is unmistakeable. “Petroleum,” says one of the students.
The visibility of geological structures is unique to Svalbard. Naked rock formations with clearly visible faults offer the students on the Svalbard field studies course a clear view of geological phenomena. For StatoilHydro, the oil company that is sponsoring the course, it is an important point that the structures are very similar to those found beneath the seabed of the North Sea.

The Russian mining community known as Pyramiden has been abandoned, but the
mountains and the remains of the coal deposits have an ancient story to tell people who are capable of interpreting what they see there. “We are at the Equator. Here are huge swamps and tropical rain-forests. All of this was the origin of the coal in the mountain that you can see behind you.”
Professor Arild Andresen conjures up images of a typical day on Svalbard about 300 million years ago for his audience of students, all of them clad in wind-proof jackets. That was when, during the Carboniferous Period, the foundations of
Pyramiden’s coal-mining operations were laid. Plant and animal remains were preserved, layer upon layer, in the swamps of the plains. But Svalbard moved north, and these layers moved with it. The organic remains turned into coal,
and when Svalbard and Greenland collided about 36 million years ago, the land rose.

The students’ task today is to interpret Pyramiden. Where is the fault? And where can we expect to find coal? The Pyramiden coalmining community got its name from the rock formation from which the coal is obtained. The 150 metre-high crown at the top of the formation consists of hard carbonates. The rock consists of the chalky shells of organisms that once lived in the sea. There are layers of fossilised animals that are much harder than the rest of the rock. Fossils of marine organisms rise to about 800 metres above sea level on all the mountain peaks that surround the Billefjord. “The structures that we can see in the rocks around Pyramiden
continue under the seabed,” explains Professor Rolf Mjelde of the
Department of Geosciences at the University of Bergen, who is
leading the seismics cruise to Svalbard.

Ten of the Svalex students join each round of cruises on board the R/V Håkon Mosby. Out on the fjord, they gather original data that will later be used in research.
“The students perform quality assurance tasks and process the data so that we can interpret them. This all helps them to develop their understanding of basic geological processes,” says Mjelde.

You can read more about Svalex on the project’s website: www.svalex.net

The article is published in Features 2009/2010

“The structures that we can see in the rocks around Pyramiden continue under the seabed,” explains Professor Rolf Mjelde of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Bergen, who is leading the seismics cruise to Svalbard. Foto: Guri Gunnes Oppegård