The Central Artery
Every journey on Svalbard’s western side passes through Isfjorden at some point. It’s 107 kilometers long and up to 24 wide — less a fjord in the intimate, Norwegian-postcard sense and more an inland sea with mountains. Longyearbyen sits on its southern shore. Barentsburg on the opposite bank. The inner fjords — Billefjorden, Dicksonfjorden, Tempelfjorden, Sassendalen — branch off toward the ice and the plateau. The whole system drains a good portion of central Spitsbergen.
Traveling Isfjorden slowly — on an expedition vessel rather than the fast boat between towns — is a different experience from any specific destination within it. The scale keeps shifting. What looks like a flat snowfield from the middle of the fjord becomes, on approach, a series of ridges and valleys with their own internal geography. What looks like an undifferentiated grey mountain at distance shows, close up, the horizontal layering of 400 million years of sediment: red sandstone beneath black shale beneath limestone.
Tempelfjorden and the Glacier Tongue
The inner arm of Tempelfjorden ends at Tunabreen — one of the few surge glaciers on Svalbard, meaning it periodically advances rapidly, then retreats. Between surges, the ice tongue pushes into the fjord water and the face is striped and fractured in ways that don’t look like regular calving glaciers. Lia pointed out that it looked artificial — too structured — and she wasn’t wrong. The surge process compresses the ice differently and produces a surface that reads as mechanical.
We reached Tunabreen in late July when the glacier had been in a retreat phase for several years. The meltwater was turquoise where it pooled against the ice face, then dark blue where it deepened into the fjord. A dozen ringed seals had hauled themselves onto ice floes that had calved from the front and drifted downfjord. They watched the boat with professional disinterest.
Billefjorden and the Gypsum Walls
Billefjorden branches north from the main fjord and is notable for something that sounds geological and turns out to be visually extraordinary: walls of gypsum, pale and almost cream-colored, rising from the waterline on the north shore. The gypsum weathers differently from the surrounding rock, carving into rounded formations that look, from the right angle, like baroque architectural details applied to raw cliffside. Nobody passes these without comment.
The inner end of Billefjorden is where the old Svea coal mine infrastructure connects to the coast. The mine itself — once the largest coal operation on Svalbard — closed permanently in 2017. The infrastructure is still standing, and the guides explain it with the careful neutrality required for talking about an industry that was the main employer in the region for most of a century.
Bird Cliffs of Alkhornet
At the western entrance to Isfjorden, the mountain Alkhornet rises steeply from the water in a series of ledges that host one of the most concentrated seabird colonies on western Svalbard. Kittiwakes, Brünnich’s guillemots, little auks in their thousands pack the ledges in summer, and the noise and smell from the water — even two hundred meters offshore — is remarkable. The guano stains the cliff white in long vertical streaks. The sound is continuous, layered, and somehow both chaotic and organized.
When to go: The inner fjords are generally ice-free from late June through September. Winter crossings of Isfjorden by snowmobile (February to April) are possible when the sea ice is stable, but this varies by year and must be done with guides who know the ice conditions.