Wir freuen uns über jede Rückmeldung. Ihre Botschaft geht vollkommen anonym nur an das Administrator Team. Danke fürs Mitmachen, das zur Verbesserung des Systems oder der Inhalte beitragen kann. ACHTUNG: Wir können an Sie nur eine Antwort senden, wenn Sie ihre Mail Adresse mitschicken, die wir sonst nicht kennen!

unbekannter Gast
Anzeigen

Spitsbergen#

Spitsbergen
Photo courtesy of NASA., under PD
Spitsbergen, the largest of the islands in the Svalbard Archipelago, sits well inside the Arctic Circle, just south of 80 degrees north latitude. This image of the island and its topography was captured by NASAs Terra satellite. The rugged mountains are capped with snow and glaciers, with only the river valleys and low elevations supporting vegetation.

Braided, shallow rivers filled with glacial sediment occupy the valleys. The vertical scale is exaggerated by a factor of two to emphasize the rugged terrain. The small town of Longyearbyen serves as the capital; its small airport provides the most northerly public airline service on earth.

Although coal mining is still an important economic activity on the frigid island, scientists have recently become as interested in what can be tucked away in the frozen mountains of Spitsbergen as what can be extracted from them. In late February 2008, Norway accepted the first deposit for a so-called "Doomsday" agricultural seed vault, drilled deep into the mountains overlooking the Svalbard Airport.

Financed by Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will safeguard seeds of human food crops from all over the world in the event a natural or human-caused catastrophic event would threaten the human food supply.