Longyearbyen is the administrative center of Svalbard and is located on
Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago, part of the
Kingdom of Norway. It is the world's northernmost town with over 1000
people. The settlement was founded in 1906 by John Longyear, owner of the
Arctic Coal Company. Until the early 1990s the coal mining industry was
the major employer of Longyearbyen. Near Longyearbyen, the Global Crop
Diversity Trust administers the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an Arctic safe
capable of storing millions of crop seeds as a safeguard against natural
and human disasters. Last week, the first deposit of 250,000 different
species of crop seeds was made into the repository. The perspective view
was created by draping a simulated natural color image over an
ASTER-derived digital elevation model.
The image was acquired July 12, 2003, and is located at 78.2 degrees north
latitude, 15.6 degrees east longitude.
The U.S. science team is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. The Terra mission is part of NASA's Science Mission
Directorate.
