Study trip to the artificial island Pepparholm where the Öresund bridge goes into the tunnel…

The other day I got to go on one of the coolest study trips ever (well, at least on the coolest that I have been on after I stopped going to sea… :-D) — my colleague Ivar and his bridge building course visited the Öresund Bridge, and the artificial island Pepparholm, where the bridge connects to the tunnel, and it was absolutely awesome.

When they first told us that there are about 250 people working on the bridge overall, that seemed like a lot of people. That was before I realised how many different systems are involved in running and maintaining the bridge; steering traffic for both cars and trains; communication systems including radio and telephone; electricity for lights, signals, solar cells, batteries, (and with different voltages in Sweden and Denmark!); fire fighting on the bridge with water (again, different systems for Denmark and Sweden!) and in the tunnel with water, gas, foam; mechanical installations for air conditioning, drainage, etc… Seriously impressive that all of that is working all the time!

Here are my colleage Rachel and myself very excited to go!

Pepparholm is full of Cormorants, and you can smell that they like to eat fish! Also, I am still impressed by just putting an artificial island somewhere so a bridge can go into a tunnel. Also, a lot of work to consider and mitigate the effects of sealevel rise so the mouth of the tunnel doesn’t suddenly get flooded.

The bridge is absolutely fascinating. Train at the bottom level, cars on the top level, super interesting wakes from every pillar… (Not the main point of the excursion, but very fascinating!)

You can clearly see the change in surface roughness behind every pillar where the water is sheltered from the wind and there are no directly forced capillary waves!

Also very interesting to walk so close to the train tracks. Not so cool to walk on the grids and see the water faaar below. But fun to see people who work on the bridge scooting along on e-scooters (fair enough, otherwise it’s an 8km walk)!

This is a super cool construction!

And it was also awesome to see all the curious and engaged students!

Thanks so much, Ivar, for inviting me along, it was an amazing day and I learned so much! I will never look at the bridge the same way as before, and I might mention the trip to everybody at every opportunity from now on, too!