You know you have to retire your boots when you get wet feet during the first day of rain. This will be hard, the boots were with me on Severnaya Zemlya, Novaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, Svalbard… Well…

Today we walked to the western side of the island to look at the Sutorfjella conglomerate, a unit of uncertain age. Most of its clasts resemble local units – like the big pieces of carbonaceous conglomerate that looks like the beds we have seen in the MacNairrabbane unit.

The Sutorfjella conglomerate has been suggested to be of Devonian age, as the red sandstones in central Spitsbergen. To us it looked pretty much like the young, undeformed Tertiary conglomerate we have seen yesterday in Grimaldibukta. These rocks were deposited during the development of the Forlandsundet graben and recently exposed by the retreating glaciers. Maybe the Sutorfjella conglomerate developed contemporaneously on the other side of the horst? Just a wild guess when we sat there discussing what we see, there’s no proof.

Kuba ”tested” his knee today on this 22 km roundtrip and it is working again, although a little bit slower. On the way back the rain caught us and the weather is now of the more uncomfortable sort – no heavy rain, but the air feels like a swimming pool. One step out of the tent and everything is wet from all sides… If it is the same weather tomorrow we will start the day with some maintenance – rifle cleaning and an attempt to fix our battery pack for charging the communication equipment. Until now it just discharged as soon as the solar panels were connected.

Henning Lorenz, Uppsala universitet