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I am fascinated with Norway’s $47 billion superhighway project because it will allow it to overcome an incredible challenge.
And that is Geography.
Norway’s landscape is dominated by the Scandinavian mountains and a coastline filled with deep fjords and glaciers, creating its extraordinarily complex geography consisting of over 50,000 islands!
The 1,100 km stretch from Kristiansand to Trondheim takes 21 hours with an average speed limit of 48 km/h and requiring seven ferry crossings that can take as much as 45 minutes.
The project will cut the travel time by half by filling the road gaps in massive fjords eliminating the need for ferry crossings.
The Boknafjorden crossing will feature the epic Rogfast subsea road tunnel slated for completion in 2026.
It will be the longest and deepest subsea road tunnel in the world, stretching 27 km and almost 400m below sea level.
The system consists of twin tunnels, each 10.5m diameter supporting two lanes of traffic.
And the tunnel will have its infrastructure to keep it operational, including 51 high-voltage technical rooms, 17 pump stations, and 480 emergency kiosks.
And in September 2019, the government selected a single curved pontoon bridge.
Once complete it will be the world’s longest floating bridge.
At over 5.4km, the Bjornafjorden bridge is almost twice as long as the Golden Gate bridge.
On top of its length, it has a 50 m clearance from ship traffic on one side.
And it will consists of 40 steel pontoons spaced 100 meters apart, serving as floating foundations for the bridge.
Now let’s go to Sognefjorden, the deepest fjord on the highway at over 1.3km deep.
A conventional suspension bridge built for the Sognefjorden would need to be twice as long as the existing record holder and would have to be three times longer than Golden Gate.
So, engineers have proposed three different designs, a suspension bridge as previously described, a floating bridge, and a submerged floating tunnel.
It would be a triple span suspension bridge with two mid-towers floating on 75 m wide pontoons anchored to the seafloor with special lines.
And the third design is the extraordinary submerged floating tunnel concept that would be the first of its kind.
The tunnel would consist of two 4km long concrete tubes floating 20 meters below the surface and anchored by pontoons allowing marine traffic to pass through.
The bridge will be anchored by two 250m towers and is set for construction starting in 2024 or 2025.
The bridge is relatively straight forward compared to the others, so now let’s head over to the Vartdalsfjorden crossing.
Until the Rogfast tunnel is complete the Eiksund is the deepest undersea tunnel in the world at over 280m below sea level.
The construction required 1,300 tonnes of explosive and excavating over 600,000 cubic meters of rock.
The Sulafjorden has two proposed solutions; the first is a conventional suspension bridge.
The mid-tower for the suspension bridge proposal would be anchored to the seafloor 400 meters below the surface.
And the second proposal is a submerged floating tunnel concept similar to the one proposed for the Sognefjorden.
Alright, next is the Romsdalsfjord crossing.

It will replace two ferry trips and consist of a 16km undersea tunnel and a 2 km suspension bridge.
The tunnel will be comprised of twin two-lane tubes similar to the Rogfast tunnel.
And the bridge will be the longest in Norway; its main span will be the third-largest single span in the world.
And the final crossing is Halsafjorden.

Possible solutions include a suspension bridge, floating bridge, and submerged floating tunnel.
There’s no doubt that once Norway’s superhighway is complete, it will be one of the if not the most complex highway in the world.