With its spectacular geology entirely unobscured by tall vegetation, Svalbard is one of the best places in the world to study rock formations. But the High Arctic Norwegian archipelago is constantly reshaped by fast-moving glaciers and landslides that hide geological information. Researchers are racing to catalog Svalbard’s landscape for students and future research.
“We only have half a year of light to work with.”
Digital outcrop models (DOMs) are created by stitching together thousands of overlapping photographs of a rock outcrop into a three-dimensional image. The advent of low-cost drones, which can be programmed to fly automated grid patterns and take photographs of the ground from different angles, has made DOMs easier to create, allowing geologists to study outcrops from the comfort of an office computer. That’s particularly useful in Svalbard, which is plunged into darkness during the winter months.
“We only have half a year of light to work with,” explained Peter Betlem of the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). Betlem is the digital data lead for a project that has been archiving DOMs of Svalbard’s outcrops and making them publicly available through an online portal called Svalbox. The work was recently published in Geosphere.
Venturing into rarely visited parts of the archipelago by boat, the team has so far modeled 135 outcrops, including the famous Festningen outcrop—a 7-kilometer-long cliff of layered sediments deposited over 400 million years.
Svalbox was initially developed for teaching purposes, Betlem said. “We have students who come in the dark season and are not able to see the rocks.” Using DOMs, “we can allow them to look at the outcrop from different angles and absorb the information,” he said. “Then, when we go into the field, the outcrop is not new to them.” But the digital outcrops are increasingly contributing to ongoing research into carbon capture and storage on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
DOMs give researchers a perspective that’s hard to get from the ground, Betlem said. “Many times, you cannot see the faults, the structures, and the way the sediments are deposited. Having this view from the air and looking at the same outcrop from different angles is really beneficial.”
Documenting a Changing Landscape
Ice floes frequently alter Svalbard’s outcrops. “We have a lot of surging glaciers,” marine geoscientist and study coauthor Nil Rodés explained. “So the geomorphology of the island is changing very quickly.”
“Many of the sites we’ve been to have been eroded by glaciers,” Betlem said. “They are no longer there.”
And climate change, Rodés said, is hitting Svalbard hard because melting permafrost causes landslides that sometimes bury outcrops. “One of the goals is to collect a virtual model of how the outcrop was at the time of the data collection, in case you lose that information.”
The Svalbox project is “a pilot project for the rest of the world.”
The team is making their models, along with the associated raw photographs, additional data, and metadata, available for anyone, using open-source repositories including Zenodo and the Norwegian National e-Infrastructure for Research Data.
The project comes at a time when scientists are seeing the value of their work beyond just the single paper they write and are trying to get their own DOMs out to the world, said Clare Bond, an Earth scientist at the University of Aberdeen who was among the first to research the use of drone-based virtual outcrops. “I think we’re still really at the nub of these kinds of databases becoming standard.” Bond is not directly involved in the Svalbox project.
Svalbox is “a pilot project for the rest of the world. It’s signing the path for the future,” said Stefano Tavani, a geologist with the University of Naples Federico II who has worked extensively with DOMs but is not involved in the Svalbox project. Though the process of building a DOM is well established, the amount of raw data that goes into them means making them available to the world is impractical, he pointed out. Once the data are archived, the cost of server maintenance becomes prohibitive.
“There are some public repositories,” Tavani said, “but you cannot access the entire data set, just the final model—frequently downsized.” The Svalbox team, he explained, is “building an environment to share all the data.”
For Betlem, making these publicly funded data sets available on an open-source platform is about providing opportunities for collaboration and making sure they will be available for researchers to use indefinitely. “What typically happens, when you make these resources available but keep the source code or the source imagery to yourself, is that when your career ends, the source material ends as well.
“I’m not going to live forever. I’m probably not going to be in academia forever,” Betlem said. Svalbox is available open source “to make sure that someone doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel and go out and collect all the same data again.”
—Bill Morris, Science Writer