Midnight sun

Yesterday evening I managed to stay up late enough to go for a walk at midnight. Because of daylight savings time, the sun isn't at its lowest until 01:00, so I guess this post should be titled, "1 am sun"

I wandered by the old cemetery, which made news recently as it was the site of an unsuccessful and acrimonious attempt to find genetic material from the 1918 flu pandemic.


I also stopped by the old museum, where most of the interesting stuff was apparently left behind when the museum moved to its slick new digs downtown



Fossils of temperate climate plants are pretty common around here:



The paleomagnetic record here shows that this area has been migrating steadily north from the equator over the last 300 million years or so. These fossils are about 100 million years old.


I also stopped by the church, which is the northernmost church in the world

I saw some things you might expect to find in any Lutheran church


and some that seemed a little out of place:



Near the church is a 24-hour sunclock. There was a bank of clouds covering the sun at solar midnight, but I did see a shadow a bit earlier:

Oh happy day!

Well, this is seriously off topic, but it really made my morning to read that Karl Rove had quit. It's comforting to realize that abuse of power is eventually self defeating.

Longyearbyen

The largest town in the Svalbard archipelago, and my home for the next two days is Longyearbyen. It was begun as a coal mining town, and coal is still important here, although tourism seems to be the biggest industry.

Coal staging area on the airport road
Shetland ponies
The town from the glacial moraine above
The Longyear glacier:

Some Dr. Suess flowers:
The glacial outwash is pretty:

A reindeer. These are much smaller than I expected. I went for a walk up the valley this morning, and saw reindeer tracks, and then finally this guy. The tracks are about cow-sized, but the actual animal is goat-sized. No polar bear tracks though. You're supposed to bring a rifle if you go outside the settlement here. The foot of the glacier is practically in the town, though, so I didn't bother. There are places here in town that rent rifles, so if I go for a longer walk I'll probably bring one.

In transit

I like the window seat. It makes a trip by air go much faster for me to look out the window and try to recognize places below, or just to appreciate the scenery. It's usually not so easy to take pictures out of the airplane window, as they are usually dirty and the sun is often glaring. Regardless, here are some of the better pictures from my trip over.

This is a wind farm in the Sacramento delta, just east of San Francisco.


Lake Tahoe was pretty, despite the recent fires:


This one is a little hard to make out, but it is the town of Wheatland, WY, where my brother John and family live:




Here is one of the sandhills of Nebraska. These hills are sand dunes that have grown grass over them, holding them in place:



Here is the very western tip of Wales:



The Welsh countryside:

The far north of the Norwegian mainland:



And, finally, Svalbard:

Introduction

In the past, when I've traveled, I have kept an email diary for family and friends. That worked pretty well, but during my last trip to South America, I took a lot of digital pictures, which caused problems with some email accounts. This time, I will make my journal here.

Unlike before, I won't be able to post regularly, as I will be without internet most of the time. I will fill in the rest when I get home, I guess.

Also unlike before, this trip is mostly for business. I work for a small R&D company making a portable X-ray diffraction instrument that allows mineral identification in the field. NASA is one of our clients, and we were invited to bring our instrument on its maiden voyage along with the rest of the AMASE expedition.