Longyearbyen

Longyearbyen (lông'yērbü"un) [key], town and administrative center of Svalbard, on Isfjorden, Spitsbergen island. It is a coal-mining settlement, founded (1905) by an American company and named after the American miner J. M. Longyear. Its coal mines were transferred to a Norwegian company in 1916. It was destroyed (Sept., 1943) by German battleships but was quickly rebuilt. The Svalbard International Seed Vault, a seed bank designed as a global backup storage facility, is inside a mountain near the town.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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