It's freezing cold in the shadow of the mountain facing the sea. The cars whizz past us on the way to the airport. When the noise of the traffic fades away, the voices of the three students Kiiu Adelholm, Karina Mougaard, and Finn Nørgaard-Pedersen fill the air. They are all in their third semester of the BEng in Arctic Civil Engineering programme at DTU's campus in Sisimiut, which is an important base for the Greenlandic educational environment. Today they are busy doing fieldwork.
"I think the easiest thing is to stand back and try to get an overview," says Ole Skursch, a postdoc at DTU Sustain, who teaches civil engineering. He has just dropped the students off at the mountain. Now, they are counting cracks and measuring whether they are vertical, wavy, or rough, and whether they are naturally formed or originate from blasts. The task is part of understanding how stable the mountain is and whether it is, in principle, strong enough to build a road or a tunnel on the site.
"It's a fantastic experience studying in Sisimiut, where you get to work in these stunning surroundings, carry out fieldwork, and learn a lot of things. You feel an enormous sense of freedom up here in Greenland, where you can go out and do all kinds of exciting things, from snowmobiling in the mountains to fishing out at sea," says Finn Nørgaard-Pedersen.
