Tag: Airport road

Walk along the cliffs just above the road. Pay attention to the different rock types you encounter: layered mudrock, silt- and sandstone from the Cretaceous Carolinefjellet Formation. These sediments were deposited on the sea floor around 115 million years ago. You can find beautiful sedimentary structures and trace fossils. Here, these rocks are folded. They were folded when Svalbard and Greenland collided! In the Early Tertiary, when the Longyearbyen coal was deposited, Svalbard was still attached to Northeast Greenland. Due to simultaneous opening of Baffin Bay and the North Atlantic,

At this position, one can see a steep normal fault in the mountain side. Normal faults occur when rock is subject of extensional movement and breaks. Further towards the airport, folding and faulting caused by compression is visible. Compressional and extensional structures are often related, with the compressional structures perpendicular to the main stress direction, and the extensional structures more or less parallel to it.

Walk along the cliffs just above the road. Pay attention to the different rock types you encounter: layered mudrock, silt- and sandstone from the Cretaceous Carolinefjellet Formation. These sediments were deposited on the sea floor around 115 million years ago. You can find beautiful sedimentary structures and trace fossils. You can also find marine fossils such as shells and ammonites. Look for the „cannon-balls“, round concretions formed by decaying organic material in the seafloor mud. With a lot of luck you can even find fossilized wood here.