PROF EIVIND GRØV | INTERVIEW
ivind Grøv loves rock. As a building material it beats almost anything that mankind has managed to produce in the
millennia that have passed since we first started living in cities back in Sumeria some eight thousand years ago. “There have always been caverns,” he says, “and people have always used them. Look at the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpa in Malaysia. There is a huge rock cavern in limestone. It is used as a temple. It is a karst phenomenon, high and wide, and it is self-stable – when I did a visit it showed no need for shotcrete or wall support or concrete structures at all. It is just a beautiful cave, and very very big. It shows that nature is an ingenious engineer.” And people have always tunnelled
through rock mass. “People have been building underground
for two thousand years and more. Most breathtaking is the 5.5km-long tunnel through Mount Salviano that was conceived by Julius Caesar and carried out under the Emperor Claudius to drain Lake Fucino outside Rome. It has 33 vertical shafts.” Many tunnels and caverns are lined, with
concrete or brick or iron. Grøv prefers bare rock mass. That is possibly because he is Norwegian. “It goes back to actually utilising different
geologies as a construction material, with all their different capabilities and capacities and weaknesses; and that is actually what has been motivating me: that what we call the rock mass is a beautiful construction material. It is not an engineered material so we have to learn to know it and take this into account in the design. “That is certainly true in Scandinavia
where we have lovely hard rock; but there are lots of places which have the same type of beautiful rock mass that we have here so the possibility actually to utilise the rock as a construction material exists in many other places around the world.” Not everywhere is so blessed. There are
sandy places, and clayey places, and chalky or fractured or waterlogged places. “Of course, it would be utterly wrong
to try to implement something which works in Scandinavia in places where you’re working with sedimentary layers and loose rock or soft ground conditions. I have given presentations in a number of places around the world and always I make two statements: one, that we have such good rock mass in Norway; and, two, that the Norwegian Government is so rich from North Sea Oil that it can build whatever
tunnels it would like with that money. Both statements are untrue. “Because in tunnelling you have always
the possibility to meet continuously changing conditions. You could be working with beautiful high quality rock mass, then you move forward one metre and find you are in a weaker zone. The fact that we are able to understand and take benefit from all the different capabilities that rock masses possess makes it possible for us to actually use this to make beautiful caverns and tunnels that are useful to society. And this is true not only for Norway but in lots of different places.” Such as, just for example, those Kuala
Lumpur caves. “We have now the competence to build
underground in almost all geologies,” he says, “and we have now a global concern and a global need to build underground, because space above ground is running out. The motto of the Norwegian Tunnelling Society is ‘Surface problems – Underground solutions.’ We need the above-ground spaces for people, and for nature and biodiversity and carbon-capturing forests and so on. “And, in addition, the need of going
underground today is also related to the fact – and I don’t like to bring it into the discussion but we have to acknowledge it – that there is a geopolitical situation today which is bringing about a very uncertain world. I am old enough to have lived through Soviet Premier Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk in the United Nations.” [It happened in 1960]. “We grew up during the Cold War. Those times were in some sense predictable. What we see today is not predictable. “The sad fact is that we have a situation
that may force us to find solutions that let us protect ourselves and that secure for us sufficient stores of water and food and so on. We may need a refuge, for people and for supplies. The underground can provide these kind of things to us.” Or if ecological disaster rather than war
is the issue, it may be worth noting here the Global Seed Vault on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen (main island in the archipelago known as Svalbard), 1.3 million seed samples, collected together from almost every country, are stored in a tunnel dug into the permafrost. This is a ‘gene bank’, its purpose is to secure the foundation of our future food supply should existing, potentially vital, varieties of food crops be lost.
So railways, roads, hospitals, work places,
spaces to generate and store power, and to provide refuge against disaster – all of these, he says, can be usefully placed underground. Homes, he says, should not be. “I do not think that living underground
should be the goal. It has been done in the past: in Libya, in Cappadocia in Turkyë and in other places, underground houses worked well for their people; and Petra is, of course, astonishing. But I think the goal of building underground would be that it enables us to free the surface for human beings. “Probably it would be possible to live
underground in apparent comfort. You can have artificial lights and circulating fresh air and all these kind of things that you need, but I think that we should prioritise the overground space for people. As a species we should be able to see the sky.” Working underground, though, is
something quite different. “It is perfectly realistic that both white-
collar and blue-collar work would be in underground facilities in the future. We have quite a few already; new ones only need imagination. In Singapore an Underground Science City was proposed. Hospitals could be placed underground – one was suggested some time ago for the city of Mecca to serve the pilgrims. Fire stations could be underground; so could national archives – the Vatican has already done that. Garages and workshops, laboratories, testing facilities – one could even consider graveyards.” The sky is not the limit. “The fantasy is the limit,” he says. “This is where we should occupy ourselves. So how did all this begin? Why did he
decide to become a tunneller? “I didn’t decide. When I was in college
I wanted to have a job where I could be outdoors in nature, travelling, and not being always in an office. I was studying geology, so I became a geologist within the field of engineering geology, which seemed to tie those three things together.” Born and raised in Drammen, just north
of Oslo, from early in life he enjoyed cross-country skiing and soccer. But he also recalls the ‘Spiralen’ tunnel, located by the town. A spiral tunnel, it was originally excavated up through a hill to provide rock for landfill along a river and fjord. Afterward the tunnel became a tourist attraction, letting visitors proceed up the hill, travelling inside. With no family working in his chosen field
of geology and underground engineering, he reflects on Spiralen was maybe seeded
August 2025 | 35
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