Infrastructure of Scale - World

Having spent a reasonable amount of time looking around me and focusing on the day to day, even micro-scale - I decided to back up for just a bit.. A lot of aspects of my life and observation are changing, slowly the day to day perspective in my mind, and soon the day to day physical surroundings. I have began reading Paul Shepard while reflecting on my upcoming move - Norway. It seems only fair to dwell for a second on the global scale at the very most basic and historic infrastructure existing - Geology. Beneath everything that we have ever built or dreamt of building are often overlooked layers of soil and rock - land formations with specific identities and traits that have existed long before us..


Roughly, this is the path I will be taking later this summer. At this scale it appears manageable enough, but scrolling north and east on Google maps between New York, NY and Trondheim, Norway shows it to be an impressive distance, a bit over 3600 miles to be more precise. The change in latitude is most striking when comparing relative location to Italy or Ireland.

As Google's aerial views are taken in winter, the differences between these places stand out even moreso. The following shots are of the areas around New York and Trondheim taken at the same scale:

Long Island really is quite large for the record. The area is impressively flat when it comes down to it.

Norway is dark in the winter. From what I've read, the Trondheim area experiences approximately 3 months of 3-5 hours of daylight or less each year. Zoom into the city of Trondheim in Google and it's covered both in patches of snow and a consistent gray mist, also typical for the Scandinavian countries. The topography is intense - a mountain range runs along the right edge of this image, while the country slowly opens up to Atlantic Ocean further west.

New York and Trondheim are both somewhat coastal, but with various layers of protection from open sea. Beyond this, I expect that both the geologic and climatic differences will be great. As daunting as Norway's winter may be, I continue to believe that it sets up great groundwork for research. How do people live in these conditions, and exactly what infrastructure (on a local scale) is necessary to deal with such an agressive natural infrastructure dealt to this country over the past millions of years on the global scale?