3:23 p.m., Aug. 2, 2010----About 9:30 A.M. land came in sight. Steep, rocky crags and peaks, covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds...

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Thus wrote U.S. adventurer and entrepreneur John Munro Longyear in his journal entry for July 14, 1901, expressing his initial reaction to Spitsbergen, a group of islands in the Barents Sea far to the north of Norway.

Spitsbergen and the ways in which its land would be used were to change profoundly over the next few years after Longyear, who had earlier amassed fabulous wealth through his timber and mining ventures in the U.S. Midwest, saw opportunity in seams of good-quality coal cropping out on slopes high above the floor of what soon would be named Longyeardalen (“Longyear Valley”).

Present-day permafrost researchers also saw opportunity on these Norwegian islands, now collectively known as Svalbard, for the location of the third European Conference on Permafrost (EUCOP III) held June 13-17 at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). The conference was attended by more than 250 scientists from 27 countries, including permafrost researchers from the University of Delaware.

Frederick (Fritz) Nelson, UD professor of geography, has been working on problems involving permafrost for over a quarter century and has published more than 125 peer-reviewed articles and several monographs on the subject. Permafrost is defined as “any subsurface earth materials that remain in a continuously frozen state for two or more years.”

Nelson and UD doctoral graduate Nikolay Shiklomanov, now an assistant professor at George Washington University, oversee the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) program, the world's oldest and most comprehensive global-change research program focused on permafrost.

EUCOP III featured several sessions devoted to the active layer and the CALM program. One presentation by Nelson, Shiklomanov, and Dmitry Streletskiy -- who received a Ph.D. in climatology from UD in 2010 -- outlined plans for the third block (CALM III) of research funding from the National Science Foundation. CALM III was recently funded for more than $2 million, and will run through 2014.

During the event, Nelson also delivered the conference's keynote public lecture, “The Unintended Research Legacy of John Munro Longyear,” open to conference participants, townspeople, and tourists, about Longyearbyen's (Longyear City's) namesake.

A serious injury motivated the 23-year-old Longyear to move to Michigan's Upper Peninsula for health reasons in 1873, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the establishment, among many other ventures, of a major coal-mining industry in Svalbard.

By the mid-1880s, Longyear had amassed a fortune through shrewd land deals and mining ventures in Upper Michigan and was one of the richest men in the country. He served as mayor of Marquette, Mich., was on the boards of several universities including MIT, and founded one of the most exclusive sportsmen's clubs in the country.

Following the tragic death of his 20-year-old son in 1900, Longyear took his family on an extended journey that included a stop in Spitsbergen. He returned in several subsequent summers, and by 1905 had chartered the Arctic Coal Company (ACC), the first commercially viable coal-mining operation in Svalbard.

All parts of the Svalbard Archipelago not covered by glacial ice are underlain by permafrost, and ACC's efforts to tunnel into hillsides repeatedly encountered massive ground ice that required engineering solutions not widely known at the time. A dedicated diarist, Longyear made numerous notes about these problems in his journals, revealing a keen mind brimming with physical insight and practical problem-solving abilities, Nelson said.

Longyear's efforts to mine coal in this rigorous environment were successful, and more than 100,000 metric tons of it was shipped from Spitsbergen between 1905 and 1916, when Longyear and his partner sold the operation to Norwegian mining interests. In 1920, Svalbard was awarded to Norway under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Among the treaty's unusual provisions is a clause that allows citizens of any signatory nation to live and work in Svalbard without visa requirements.

Nelson has crossed Longyear's path repeatedly since the day of his first college class in the Longyear Hall of Pedagogy at Northern Michigan University. Nelson was twice the recipient of the University of Michigan's Scott Turner Award, named for Longyear's cousin, who was the on-site manager of the Arctic Coal Company's operations in Spitsbergen.

Since 2004, Nelson has operated a climate-observation program along the southern shore of Lake Superior in the Huron Mountain Club (HMC), one of the largest areas of primeval forest remaining in the eastern U.S. Longyear founded HMC in 1889.

In 1955, a quasi-independent organization known as the Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation (HMWF) was formed, following development of a land-management plan for HMC by Aldo Leopold. Nelson stays for several weeks each year in Longyear's summer house at “Emblagaard,” an experimental farm now owned by HMWF and operated within club boundaries as a scientific field station.