JodockWorldTravel

August 15, 2025 (Longyearbyen, Norway – Day 2)

Mining is where it all started for Longyearbyen. Workers drawn by the promise of high wages moved themselves and their families here, mostly from other areas of Norway, even before Longyearbyen was officially part of Norway. It is the main reason that sixty-six percent of this town of 2,400 people representing fifty-three nationalities are Norwegian. For over 100 years mining has defined the character and culture of Longyearbyen, despite its increasing dependency on tourism and scientific research. But as of July 31, 2025, Norwegian mining operations no longer exist on the Svalbard archipelago.

The Svalbard archipelago is a group of hundreds of islands located halfway between Norway and the North Pole and spread among the Arctic Ocean and Barents, Greenland and Norwegian Seas. Longyearbyen is the most inhabited area in the archipelago.

There were lots of nationalities visiting or living on Longyearbyen in the 18th and 19th centuries, but no one had laid formal claim to it or its sister islands. The question of who should be granted sovereignty was raised multiple times, with Norway suggesting it should be the chosen one because of its geographic proximity, but the matter was not settled until after WWI. By that point world order had shifted as had Norway’s place in it. In an agreement reached in February 1920 as part of the Paris Peace Talks Norway was granted sovereignty over the Svalbard archipelago, though the Treaty was not enforced until August 14, 1925. It gives Norway control over the archipelago while allowing citizens of all signatory nations to live and work there. The treaty also declared the islands a demilitarized zone and separated its official economic activities from those of Norway. Norway provides what some refer to as “bare bones” government services and infrastructure for Longyearbyen, but it is otherwise fairly independent.

Our activity today took us to Store Norske Spitsbergen KulKompani Mine #3. If you read yesterday’s post, you know that the coal mines on Longyearbyen were originally owned by American John Longyear and his company, Arctic Coal. Longyear sold the coal mines to Store Norske in 1916, and over time Store Norske became a wholly Norwegian state-owned company. Eventually they would come to run seven mines on the island. We are visiting Mine #3, which operated from 1971 to 1996 and has been preserved as a sort of living museum. The miners knew the mine was going to close, but they didn’t have an exact date. One day they showed up for work and at the end of their shift they were told there was no need to return. Many of them left their boots, work clothes and other items right where they were. In that way the mine operates as a bit of a time capsule.

Our tour began in what was once the lunchroom/meeting area for the miners. We watched part of a documentary cataloguing a day in the life of a miner, and then our guide introduced us to the layout of the mine and talked about the mining process. The map below provide an outline of the mine. Areas in gray are where coal has been removed.

The 3-D diagram indicates where in the mine “streets,” or tunnels have been created for excavating coal. Unlike the town, whose 25 miles of road do not sport a single road sign, all of the roads in the mine have names and signs. The black areas on the board are the coal deposits. The grooves are the tunnels or streets. The areas where you see spikes are streets that have been mined. It was important to keep track of who was where and what streets had been or were being mined because all of the mine operations in the area were extracting coal from the same mine. Knowing which areas have been or are being worked is essential to maintaining the integrity of the mine’s ceiling and ensuring it did not collapse on any of the workers.

The coal in Longyearbyen’s mine is located deep within the earth. It is thick, smooth, flat and largely fault-free. This type of coal is removed using what is referred to as a longwall mining technique. The height of the coal deposit is referred to as the seam. For safety reasons miners will not dig far above the height of the coal seam; doing so creates greater instability and could cause the mind to collapse on top of the workers. The coal seam in this mine is only 25-35 inches high. This means the workers spent eight hours a day in a space no more than three feet high – every day. To make matters even worse they had to crawl the length of two football fields before they could even begin their work for the day.

There were 150 employees in Mine #3 working in three eight-hour shifts with fifty workers each. The first shift was responsible for loosening the coal. They would use a chainsaw to cut an opening, then drill holes along the ridge created and place dynamite in the holes to blow the coal out.

The second group, the “Drivers,” would use shovels to “drive” the coal into the street where it could be collected for transport.

Finally, the third crew would come in to strengthen the mine. When the coal is removed from the walls it takes away support that is keeping the mine from falling in on itself. The third crew would place jacks under the portion of the ceiling that had just been mined to keep it from collapsing on the second shift when they came back to continue their job. There would normally be 500 jacks in place by the time a complete street had been mined. Once the removal of coal was complete those jacks had to be removed. Teams would work together, knocking the jacks out from under themselves, one jack at a time. Each time they removed a jack they would stop, wait and listen. With each removal the mountain would make little sounds. A moan or a groan meant they could continue removing jacks; if they heard a rumble they would yell, “Now she’s coming” and everyone would make for the exit. As a general rule of thumb 6-9′ of ceiling would be collapsing at a time. When all of the jacks had been removed the teams would work together to create a new street.

Now that we understood the process it was time to go see the mine for ourselves. We donned hard hats and gloves and received our safety briefing. We were warned about the gases emitted in the removal of coal, educated about how those gas levels are being monitored and shown how to use the “oxy box” in case of a leak. Yes, that hugely cumbersome she’s holding in her hand is a breathing mask for just such occasions. The oxy box that houses it is the cute little silver and black recepticle she’s holding.

And in we go!

Initially the miners used friction jacks to hold up the ceiling. They weighed about 35 lbs. each. Eventually they were deemed to be too dangerous and the company replaced them with hydraulic jacks. Hydraulic jacks could support more weight, and you could put them in place and remove them using a long handle-type mechanism. But! They weighed a lot more, too – 90 lbs. plus the weight of the bar used to put them in place and remove them. Needless to say, the miners were not happy about this. In the pictures below the first jack is the friction jack; the second jack is the hydraulic one. The main visual difference is that the hydraulic jack has a crossbar type feature near the top that allowed miners to use a bar to set it in place or pull it out. Ken can attest to how hard it is to lug those hydraulic puppies around!

It turns out more than mining is happening in this place. How many of you out there know that there is such a thing as a “Dooms Day Vault?” That’s not it’s official name, but that is sort of the point of it. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault contains seed samples of all types of plants from all over the world, including wild and no longer in use varieties. The seeds are maintained in a very specific physical environment and serve as a back-up to the world’s food supply. Having this supply increases agriculture’s ability to adapt crop production to changes in climate, local growing conditions, and people’s eating habits. Did you know that since 1900 the U.S. has lost over ninety percent of its fruit and vegetable varieties? Or that today China produces only ten percent of the variety of rice it did in the 1950s? Losing crop diversity means losing diversity in taste and in nutrition. The Genetic diversity represented in the vault could provide DNA traits needed to develop new varieties of existing crops or establish new production of crops that have been wiped out. The need for and value of the vault recently played out in Syria, where a civil war all but eliminated their agriculture and they had to basically start from scratch. They were able to use the seed samples stored in this vault to do so. There are 1,700 similar vaults located all around the world. The box in the photo below full of tubes of seeds is similar to those found in the vault. The sign on the door of the vault refers to it as the Fertility God’s Chamber.

A similar vault exists for the preservation of historical and cultural data. Participants donate material on microfiche expected to last a minimum of 2,000 years. The intent is to inform those who come after us what life was like before them. Contents of the Arctic World Archive include things like digitized copies of constitutions, the painting The Scream, the Vatican Library, and GitHub (recently purchased by Microsoft) publicly available open-source code.

By now we were traveling in pitch black, with only our headlamps to light the way. We were in the middle of the mountain, between seven and eight hundred feet underground. The temperature had been steadily dropping as we made our way deeper and deeper into the mine and now it was right about 28 degrees. The temperature in the mine remains constant.

We had the opportunity to truly experience life as a miner by donning coveralls and crawling into one of the old streets. Initially five people volunteered to try it (we were not among them), but ultimately only two did it. The street they were crawling into is more than six hundred feet deep. Its access point supported by nothing but a few logs wedged between walls and against each other. Discarded jacks were on the ground beneath it. In the wall across from the entrance they were crawling into we were able to see the coal seam we’d heard about earlier. It is the black area in the last photo.

Both of the guys who went in said they wouldn’t last an hour in this workspace, let alone eight. Some of the workers who came in the beginning came for just a few years to make a pile of money and go back home. Others stayed and moved on to less demanding jobs as they aged. There was one individual who continued his job working in this confined space for 40 (!) years.

When mining operations began in the early 1600s, coal was transported by rail. The challenge was that the track was often covered in snow, and workers had to spend a lot of time and effort digging snow tunnels for the train to travel through. The solution was a funicular railway that could carry the coal above ground. Its use was continued until the last mine shut down.

The miners of Svalbard worked hard in cold, dark, isolated conditions, creating a town, a culture and a legacy in the process. Their supporters now wonder how those too young to retire will transition to something new. How will they be affected by Longyearbyen’s requirement that everyone who lives there have a job and secure place to live if they are unable to find new employment on the island and can no longer afford their homes? They worry, too, about how the culture will change if so many Norwegians are forced to leave to find work. Many believe to the population will remain stable, but the composition will change, and Norwegians will make up less and less of the total population. They’ve seen how mine closures affected similar communities in Virginia and Kentucky in the U.S. and don’t want to see a similar fate befall them. They also worry that the Treaty giving Norway dominion over them also puts them at risk of another country coming in and essentially taking over the islands, specifically Russia. Russia has the only active mining operations on the archipelago now, and tensions have been high since their invasion of Ukraine. It will be interesting to revisit this entry in five or ten years and see how the landscape has changed.

So ends our time in this wonderful little town. We’ve been disappointed not to be able to witness the beauty of the surrounding fjords we’ve heard so much about, but nature had a surprise in store for us as we made our way towards the Barents Sea. The clouds remained, but the mountains emerged enough to give us a show and everywhere we looked we saw glaciers. The cell phone camera had a hard time capturing the majesty of it, but we hope you’ll get a sense of the awe and wonder that saw us on our way. What may look like clouds near the water in those last three pictures are actually fields of ice.