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This week's Friday Field Photo is from the Arctic island group of Svalbard. The rocks shown here are Eocene (~40-50 million years) in age and record the accumulation of sediments in a swampy coastal plain environment. Note the aging coal mine structure near the bottom of the photo. The coal layers are thin compared to the estuarine and fluvial (river-derived) sandstones in the cliffs above and below but still in sufficient quantities for active mining in the region.
The strata here are in the same general area (although a bit younger if I remember correctly) as the rocks that were the focus of this recent paper in Nature by Cui et al. about carbon release during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago.
Also note the cloudy weather in this photo. The crummy weather, unfortunately, prevented us from climbing up this mountainside to view and describe the rocks. That's just the way the field goes sometimes.
Happy Friday!
Image: from my collection; Creative Commons -- attribution-non-commerical-noderivs
