Beach ridges

Close to the end of the runway, you can find nice fossil beach ridges. They can be seen as sea-parallel lines on land, being formed by variations in vegetation or forming elongated elevations. The glaciers on Svalbard were well beyond a thousand metres thick during the last ice age, and the weight of the ice pressed the earth crust down by almost two hundred metres. When this ice disappeared, the crust started to pop up again. The result was land uplift and consequently a retreating shoreline, leaving traces of former