Earlier this month one of our dedicated partners from Telenor jumped out of an airplane in Antarctica, close to the South Pole. Not only did he take in the beautiful scenery. He was carrying a highly advanced sensor kit – supplied by Jotun R&D – in his backpack. 

It's been four years since we established a test station with coated metal panels close to the Norwegian Research station "Troll" (which was built in 1994 and still stands fully protected with Jotun coatings). This enabled us to directly monitor the environmental conditions and link them to how our paints and coatings perform in this extreme environment. The site made up a great supplement to our existing test stations in Dubai, Malaysia, Svalbard and so on. 

The beauty of digitalizing this entire process – by connecting the test panels with a highly advanced sensor – is that our scientists can extract live and precise data whenever they want, without having to book a flight, travel down there and register the findings manually. 

First, a huge thanks to Telenor for expanding their 5G network, enabling fast and reliable data transfers even from this remote part of the world. 

And secondly, if we put this into a historical perspective, it's beyond fascinating to consider what our founder Odd Gleditsch Sr. would have said – almost one hundred years after he sailed these waters and observed ships and steel structures corroding away – had he known the opportunities modern technology gives us today.