is the largest place and the administrative center of the Norway-administered Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean and one of the northernmost places on earth. It's on the Adventfjord.
Longyearbyen was founded as a mining town in 1906 by the American entrepreneur John Munroe Longyear. In 1943 the place was destroyed by the German Wehrmacht and rebuilt after the Second World War.
There is only one mine in operation near town today, mainly used to supply hard coal to Longyear's coal-fired power station. Coal mining on Svalbard is now mainly carried out in the Norwegian Sveagruva and the Russian settlement of Barentsburg. Longyearbyen lives mainly from tourism and research. Among other things, there is a branch of the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) and UNIS, a project by Norwegian universities, as well as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a long-term storage facility for seeds.
According to the last 2015 census, Longyearbyen has 2,144 people.