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Yoldiabukta: Wahlenbergbreen and Sveabreen

Glacier landscape in northern Isfjord

Yoldiabukta is a bay on the north side of Isfjord.

The geography in this part of Isfjord is a bit confusing: Nordfjord is a huge branch of Isfjord, located on the north side and itself branching out again several times. On the west side is Yoldiabukta, between Bohemanflya in the south and Mediumfjellet in the north. The Wahlenbergbreen glacier reaches the shore in Yoldiabukta.

North of Yoldiabukta is another, smaller bay between Mediumfjellet and the flat land of Sveasletta. This bay also has a glacier, Sveabreen. However, the bay itself has no name, which is probably due to the fact that it has only recently been formed by the retreat of Sveabreen.

Sveabreen in atmospheric September light.

Strictly speaking, Ekmanfjord and Dicksonfjord, further north, are also part of Nordfjord. To cut a long story short: Here we are looking at Yoldiabukta and its northern neighbour bay with Sveabreen. Everything else (Ekmanfjord, Dicksonfjord) has its place elsewhere.

View from Muslingodden towards “Nordre Yoldiabukta” and Sveabreen.

It is practical to have a name for the bay with Sveabreen, so here we will refer to this bay as “Nordre Yoldiabukta”, northern Yoldia Bay. Makes sense, doesn’it? And while we are at it, we can collectively refer to Yoldiabukta proper and its northern neighbour as “Yoldia Bays”. I think that will just make things a bit easier.

View from Muslingodden towards “Southern Yoldiabukta” and Wahlenbergbreen.

By the way, the Yoldiabukta got its name from the mussel Yoldia arctica, which is now officially called Portlandica arctica. A post-glacial predecessor of the Baltic Sea was also named after this mussel: the brackish Yoldia Sea, which existed 8000 years ago and in which this mussel was common.

Geology

Geology is one of the areas in which the Yoldia bays can shine. To start with, it is about the fact that sedimentary rocks from the end of the Palaeozoic and the beginning of the Mesozoic can be found here, because this transition between the great ages of evolution (which is what these ages are more about than the actual history of the Earth) is exciting. After all, this transition was one of the greatest global mass extinction events of all time, probably the result of unimaginably large volcanic eruptions that flooded millions of square kilometres of land with molten lava. However, this did not happen in Svalbard, but in other parts of the world. This global catastrophe marked the end of the ancient period in the history of life and the beginning of the Mesozoic period in the history of life: the dinosaurs arrived.

The last phase of the end of the Palaeozoic was the Permian, followed by the Triassic at the beginning of the Mesozoic. This great extinction is therefore known as the Permian-Triassic boundary. Finding a place in the area where the rocks document the end of the world at that time (which is exactly what it was from the point of view of many species) sends a shiver down the spine of anyone interested in geology! And this is exactly what you can experience in the Yoldia bays, especially in the northern one, in Lappdalen west of Sveasletta. The hills and mountains to the west of the valley are made up of older limestone from the Permian period (Kapp Starostin formation, known from Tempelfjord, Akseløya in Bellsund, Ahlstrandhalvøya in Van Keulenfjord, etc.). In Lappdalen itself, the bedrock is Triassic. There must be some dinosaur bones somewhere! Elsewhere in Isfjord, bones of marine dinosaurs, such as plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, have been found in exactly these layers. They can now be seen in museums in Longyearbyen, Tromsø and Oslo. And if you don’t find a dinosaur, there’s a good chance you will find an ammonite or a shell impression.

Think of all the treasures you could find in these mountains:
fossil corals, brachiopods, ammonite and clam impressions and even dinosaur bones!
But you need to take your time to discover their secrets.

For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the Upper Permian is missing in Svalbard. These layers may never have been deposited, or they may have been eroded away later. It is like a book from which someone has torn out a few pages. That is bad, because part of the history is missing. You have to live with it. That’s why geologists work all over the world: they look for the missing part of the story somewhere else, you will always find it somewhere in the end.

But what will probably catch the eye of people with less geological knowledge are the fantastic structures: Svalbard was pushed and pressed from the west as Greenland began to break away. Both islands used to form one large landmass. Or to put it better: North America and northern Europe together formed a huge northern continent. The North Atlantic did not exist at that time. As it formed, the coasts of the resulting ocean were first squeezed and folded on both sides. This led to the formation of the beautiful fold patterns on the west coast of Spitsbergen, which here extend as far east as Yoldia Bays. The deformation does not continue murch further to the east: Ekmanfjord is tectonically much less disturbed, with far fewer folds and faults in the mountain sides.

Geological structures on the east side of Mediumfjellet at Sveabreen.

Mediumfjellet between Wahlenbergbreen and Sveabreen is particularly well known among geologists in the area for its wildly beautiful structures, but the other mountains, especially on the west side of Wahlenbergbreen, are not inferior.

I actually thought this section would be a short three-liner 😄 but it didn’t work out. Never mind.

Landscape

Rugged mountains with wild geological structures, two fairly active glaciers, moraine covered shorelines, extensive plains in the outer areas of the shores (Bohemanflya in the south, Sveasletta in the north). That’s the short version.

Moraine landscape on the shore of Sveasletta, view towards Sveabreen.

The glaciers have retreated several kilometres since the ‘Little Ice Age’ in the 18th century. The large moraine landscapes on the shores on all sides of the Yoldia bays are evidence of this. In the recent past, however, both Wahlenbergbreen and the Sveabreen have occasionally advanced.

Glacier edge of the advancing Wahlenbergbreen (2017).

This behaviour is called ‘surge’, more about this can be found on the Borebukta page, as Borebreen showed the same behaviour around 2023-2024.

Coastal landscape at Stavneset.

This combination of wild mountains and active glaciers, which sometimes leave a lot of ice floating on the water, is a big part of the scenic charm of the Yoldia Bays.

Coastal landscape at Sveabreen.

And when you look on the map at the wide plains of Bohemanflya in the south or the smaller plains of Sveasletta, including neighbouring Lappdalen, you’ll feel like going hiking!

Aber meist sind es die Gletscher mit ihren oft aktiven Abbruchkanten und den in der Bucht treibenden Gletschereisstücken, die zuerst ins Auge fallen und die Aufmerksamkeit und die Objektive auf sich ziehen.

Drifting glacier ice near Sveabreen.

Flora and fauna

There is not much to see in the Yoldia bays themselves. Of course, you can always find a bearded seal, a ringed seal or the odd walrus on the ice. Sometimes a herd of belugas wanders through the bay, and occasionally a polar bear wanders along the shore.

Polar bear in northern Yoldiabukta.

But there are no permanent highlights, such as a large bird cliff, and the vegetation on the young moraines along the shore is sparse.

Purple saxifrage at Wahlenbergbreen.

The long, ice-free stretches of Bohemanflya and Sveasletta are a different matter: here you will find vast areas of tundra with dense vegetation, which in summer can become a colourful carpet of flowers, and of course reindeer and other typical tundra animals roam the land.

History

We can keep this section really brief: there hasn’t been much going on here. On the north side of Bohemanflya and on the north side of Muslingodden (the headland east of Mediumfjellet) there is a small trapper’s hut built by Harald Soleim in the 1970s. And that’s about it for this area.

Photo gallery: Yoldiabukta & Wahlenbergbreen

Some impressions of the beautiful landscape: mountains, glaciers, ice. The first six pictures are from 2006, when Wahlenbergbreen looked very different from what it looked like during its advance around 2017 and afterwards. That’s why these old pictures are included, even though you can see that back then digital cameras hadn’t developed too much from woodcuts and engravings.