Dark Veins of Spitsbergen: Interplay Between Ancient Vegetation and Coastal Geomorphology Exposed in the High Arctic Mines of LYB, Svalbard.

The study focuses on how coastal environments control or are controlled by vegetation distribution; collectively, these are particularly sensitive to climate change, with the geomorphology and position of the shoreline being closely linked with local hydrology and associated vegetation distribution, in particular peatlands. For this purpose, the Palaeocene Firkanten Formation (Todalen Member), located in High-Arctic Svalbard, is ideal because it consists of coastal and terrestrial deposits punctuated by abundant coal seams. This project will target very high resolution exposures within the accessable coal mines of Longyearbyen (i.e Gruve 3 and Gruve 7.) Here, high resolution sedimentological descriptions of latteral extensive drill core quality exposures of the mines will be used to develop better latteral facies understanding of environments in inter-fingering with exposed coal seams. The mines of Longyearbyen show unprecedented exposures of the Todalen Mb and will give insight into lower energy and peat- forming (coal seams) environments, which are rarely exposed in outcrop due their muddy contents and poor exposures. Latteral extensive high resolution digital outcrop modelling (DOM) of the relevant coal mines (Gruve 3 and 7) will be used to aid the large scale latteral understanding and expose any latteral facies variability which are otherwise hard and time consuming to record during arctic field excursion due to cost and time demanding logistics. Secondly, this study wants to resolve misunderstandings of the stratigraphic definition and therefore also the environmental understand of the Grønfjorden bed of the Lower most Todalen Mb. Reconnaissance data, of RiS ID:12299 and 12198, show that the Grønfjorden bed is in fact not restricted to forming on the Cretaceous unconformity, but is in fact more dynamic. Lastly the study targets the Nortwestern most exposure to resolves proximal stratigraphic development of Firkanten Fm at the Heerodden section.