Day 6 – Norway 2017. A day exploring Tromsø

The day started early, with little Evan proclaiming in his best singing voice that he was ready to get out of his bed. Today was a regular day for the family, so we had a quick breakfast, and Greg started adding one layer after another to Evancito, until he looked like an overstuffed tamal. This insulation against the cold is necessary, because in Norway they believe on making the kids tough since birth, and he spends most of his time at the day care playing outdoors (in the extreme, many kids take their naps outdoors in their baby carriers, while their mothers visit with each other inside a warm café;  Evan actually takes his nap indoors). Once ready Greg put him inside his bicycle carrier, and the two of them got lost in the night, bicycling on the snow a mile or so to get to the Barnehagen (barne for children, and hagen for hut; in other words, the day care). In the meantime Ceci and I got going in the 15 minute walk needed to get to her work. She had to attend an important monthly meeting that she couldn’t avoid, so she gave me careful instructions on how to move on the bus system, lent me her bus card, and asked me to be back at noon.

Tromsø is largely developed along the east side of an island that is about 15 km long, so most of the buses run in a N-S direction. Almost anywhere you get a glorious look at the fjord that bounds the island to the east. The university is at the north end of the city, and that is where I headed to start with, together with a whole lot of students heading for class. Mind you, at 9 am it was still dark, with only a hint of dawn on the eastern sky. At the university I visited the planetarium (closed of course) and then headed for the center of campus, where I made a warming-up stop at the library. I finally found a map of campus and noticed that the Geology Walk started right by the planetarium. Rats! So I went back, found the proper trail, and got my first introduction to the geology of Tromsø. The island is underlain by thrust sheets of the Caledonian orogeny of the lower to middle Paleozoic, with most of the rocks now turned into high grade metamorphic rocks. For the benefit of my students I will remind you that the Caledonian orogeny happened in the late Ordovician and Devonian, when the Iapetus Ocean was closed as the Paleozoic terranes of Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia collided and fused together.

There was not much to see under the snow, although one could hardly miss a few big hunks of rock labeled as gneiss, marble, and the elusive eclogite. The real punch of the whole walk was an outcrop, maybe 2 m high and 5 m long, where one of the main thrust faults was beautifully exposed. I have now seen the hallmark of the Caledonian orogeny! That outcrop was worth the whole trip to the university J

From the university I made my way back to town using the bus, and spent the following hour just window shopping. I wanted to make sure I would not be late to my meeting with Ceci, so I got there with 15 minutes to spare. Ceci works at the Polar Research Institute, which is housed in a beautiful building where all sorts of other Arctic Research units are also housed. Ceci had told me there was a library in the ground floor, so that is where I went, curious about the geologic development of the ocean floor around Norway. This question arose because when I went to the Fisheries Museum in Bergen the description of the ocean basins off the coast of Norway included the relatively shallow and oil-rich North Sea between Norway and England, a deep “trench” or “trough” off the west coast from Bergen to Tromsø, and a shallow “shelf” off the coast of northernmost Norway. The North Sea I know started as a rift (think grabens and volcanism) during the Triassic and Jurassic, but the rift failed during the Cretaceous and was filled by Cretaceous and Paleogene sediments (this is where the oil is). What about the offshore “trench” or the “shelf” far to the north? Well, the “trench” is no such thing, but rather the abyssal floor as the opening of the Atlantic spread north from the Gulf of Mexico in the Jurassic to the old suture of the Iapetus Ocean in the Cretaceous. It is just that the northernmost Atlantic has not spread that much since, so the abyssal floor is unusually narrow before the bathymetry shallows toward the mid-ocean ridge. The “shelf” on the far north is the drowned Caledonian basement that is separated from the Atlantic floor to the south by a big transform fault. The things one can find in a library given a little time!

Ceci and I finally got together, and she took me to lunch at a delightful Mediterranean restaurant. Tomorrow we are having guests for dinner, so we also had a chance to talk about menus and the things we are having to buy on the way back. But first Ceci had a couple of things to accomplish after her interminable meeting, and I wanted to visit the Polar Museum, so we once again said away and I headed into the twilight. Twilight? Yes, we had some sort of sunlight from 11 am to 1 pm, although the sun never rose high enough over the horizon for me to see it. The winter days are short in the Arctic Circle!

The Polar Museum was great. Most of the explanations were in Norwegian, but the displays were pretty clear, and with a little attention I could make some sense of the Norwegian, which includes some words reminiscent of German. Anyway, the first part of the museum was devoted to the story of the seal hunters and whalers, who were crazy tough hombres that would spend years on a row roaming the Arctic Ocean. Their center of operations had been Svalbard, a rather large island complex half way between the northern end of Norway and the North Pole. It is under Norwegian sovereignty, but is a free economic zone, and a demilitarized zone, to which Russia has access. It is also the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (a repository for the preservation of seeds from a vast variety of existing plants), and the point of departure for research cruises into the Arctic Ocean (Ceci has on many occasions boarded ships at Svalbard).

The second third of the museum chronicles the many expeditions of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928). He was one of the last great world explorers, having spent most of his life in Polar latitudes. Curiously, his main claim to fame was being the first to reach the South Pole, although the larger number of his expeditions were into the Arctic Ocean. For example, he was the first to navigate the northwest passage in 1903-1906. He was the commander of ship expeditions, zeppelin expeditions, and plane flyovers (it was in one of these flyovers that his plane never returned).

The final third of the museum is devoted to the work and expeditions of Norwegian oceanographer Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930). I have purposefully called him an oceanographer rather than an explorer because he was a scientist by training, and his famous trip with the ship Fram was a well conceived (albeit crazy) plan to get his ship locked in the Arctic ice off the coast of Siberia so it would passively shift with the ice across the North Pole and into the coast of Greenland. His plan succeeded beyod all expectations, and in its 3-year drift the Fram conducted many valuable oceanographic observations, using specialized instruments designed by Nansen himself. Besides his scientific work Nansen became involved in diplomacy and advocacy work for the oppressed in the world. In 1921 he was named the High Commissioner for Refugees for the League of Nations. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the displaced victims of the First World War and related conflicts.

Overall a very satisfying day J