Challenge Accepted

The target for our global talent programme ACCELERATOR is to offer a group of our talents a platform for personal and professional development in order to retain them - but there's more to it than that.

"Heroes at COWI are team players. So for these young talents, acting as role models implies that they're able to engage and motivate their colleagues and teams by taking responsibility, by being ambitious and by supporting others in accelerating their individual skills," says CEO Jens Højgaard Christoffersen.

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His job is to clear fjords of past environmental sins and assist the police in their investigation of a reopened murder case. In his spare time, he documents the world’s climate history. Head of Section Bjørn Christian Kvisvik is proof that physical geography is a diverse – and necessary – concern in the 21st century.

He has his outdoor gear on today – he has just cycled to work at COWI’s office in Bergen. But the Gore-Tex trousers, fleece and trail shoes are often just as important at work as on the way there. Today, for example, he is going out to survey a disused farm. There he will scan the site with georadar to determine the number of buried animal carcasses under the ground – and the possible environmental impact on the local area. His day-to-day work is varied.

Bjørn Christian Kvisvik now works as Head of Section for one of COWI’s environmental departments. He started out as a physical geographer, but has also worked in several other fields within geology – everything from climate history to sediments, geology, glaciology and geochemistry.

He remembers one trip particularly well.

It was to the old whaling island of South Georgia, southeast of the tip of Argentina and the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The island used to be known as one of the main bases for whaling. This happened after a Norwegian established the first shore station for modern whaling in the Antarctic, where Norwegian sailors lived and worked in newly-built settlements for over 50 years. Now there are no longer any permanent inhabitants on the island – apart from the animals and a British research station. Today, 2.5 million fur seals and 300,000 southern elephant seals breed on the island, and 2.7 million pairs of macaroni penguins and 400,000 pairs of king penguins nest there.

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And that was where, working with other researchers from the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research and Bergen University, between elephant seals and Alpine peaks, he took core samples from lakes and mapped the geology of the area, focusing on the influence of the glaciers.

It is easy to identify with the idea of “climate anxiety” when you see the changes close up like this. But Bjørn Christian is not too worried about how the climate changes we are seeing will affect us in little old Norway.