Spitsbergen was important for Swedish scientific expeditions and later industrialists during the period from the mid 1800's to the middle of the last century.
Most expeditions collected fossils and other geological materials. A lot of the fossils ended up in collections at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.
Professor Erik Stensiö (1891–1984) collected fossil in Svalbard during several expeditions from 1912 to 1939. This expedition to Sassendalen followed in Stensiö’s footsteps. During the expedition Stensiö’s fossil locales was documented and compared to pictures he took. Furthermore the researchers studied fossil availability and density, and collected GPS coordinates for future work.
Principal investigator
Jonas Hagström
Swedish Museum of Natural History