Flying over Svalbard

I recently set up a Vimeo page and have uploaded several short video clips I’ve taken over the years. I realize the quality of these videos is not very good — they were taken with the video function on my old point-and-shoot digital camera — but I figured poor video is better than no video!

In 2009 I spent a couple weeks on Spitsbergen, the biggest island in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic, to help teach a field course in sedimentary geology. This video is taken out the window of a small plane as we were flying from the coal mining camp of Svea back to Longyearbyen (about a 20-minute flight). The nearly flat strata, which you can see very nicely in the snow-covered mountains at the very end of the video, are Paleocene to Eocene deltaic, coastal, and fluvial deposits.