The Festningen section in western Spitsbergen represents a unique and relatively easily accessible section that record over 300 million years of Earth’s history. Festningen is routinely visited as part of UNIS (and other universities) courses, industry fieldtrips and research field trips. The section provides examples of both past climatic perturbations and petroleum/CO2 storage elements within a very well exposed stratigraphic section. In September 2020 the Svalbox team spent 2 dedicated field days to provide a digital outcrop of the entire section and make it accessible to the wider geoscience community – since then we are using Festningen as a laboratory to test various virtual field trip approaches.
Explore the Festningen field site here in a variety of field trips and models:
Explore Festningen in a Roundme field trip
Discover the fossilized world of Festningen
Read the abstract about digital Festningen
Fly over Festningen – a virtual model video:
Here the interactive Festningen model uploaded to the V3Geo digital outcrop repository:
Watch Tom Birchall`s talk about the Festningen, its geological importance and how to make a digital model out of it: