Trondheim, Johanson’s tsunami-damaged hometown, is a Norwegian coastal city whose old streets, timber houses, and sheltered fjord seem to reconcile historical continuity with scientific modernity. That apparent stability becomes precarious when the tsunami reaches the city: the fjord offers some protection, but not enough to prevent flooding across the harbour and old town. The destruction of Sigur Johanson’s house makes the disaster personal, while the city’s university and research centre place it within the novel’s wider world of marine science.

A Historic City and a Scientific Centre

In districts such as Bakklandet and Møllenberg, Trondheim’s character is conveyed through its old timber houses, parks, rustic churches, colourful waterside warehouses, gardens, and courtyards. This picturesque environment can make the city seem an unlikely centre of advanced research. Yet the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway’s principal university for the sciences, is close at hand. Trondheim is not simply a preserved historic town: its old streets and contemporary scientific work occupy the same landscape.

Møllenberg is also the setting of Johanson’s home. He lives on the ground floor of an ochre-coloured house on Kirkegata Street, distinguished by a pitched roof, white steps, and a lintel. The building’s modest, old-fashioned appearance fits his attachment to the past. Although he is a marine biologist and a modern scientist, he is drawn to ideals associated with earlier times; Jules Verne represents for him a combination of chivalry, enthusiasm for the seemingly impossible, and faith in technology. The city’s juxtaposition of historic architecture and a nearby science university therefore echoes a tension in Johanson himself: attraction to new knowledge alongside affection for an older, more beautiful world.

Work and Movement Through the City

Trondheim recurs as a point of departure and return in the scientific narrative. After returning from Kiel, Johanson contacts Tina Lund to tell her about an experiment in the deep-sea simulation chamber. Their conversation is brief: Lund is occupied with work and spending her spare time with Kare Sverdrup. Johanson senses that her attention is elsewhere but does not press her about it. The scene places professional exchange and private uncertainty within the ordinary routines of home in Trondheim.

The city also frames the accumulation of bad news. Before a lecture scheduled for ten, Johanson reads emails and looks through the post as rain falls and a grey sky hangs over Trondheim. Knut Olsen appears at his office door and remarks on the seemingly endless bad news. Elsewhere, Finn Skaugen travels from Stavanger to a meeting to hear a detailed account of findings; Lund wants to speak with Johanson beforehand so they can agree on a strategy. The city’s research institutions are thus connected to a wider network of colleagues, journeys, and emerging marine threats, even while the scenes remain anchored in daily work and weather.

A departure from the research centre gives Trondheim a more distant, indistinct aspect. Johanson boards a helicopter, which lifts away toward the fjord; the city is veiled in mist, and lakes and mountains pass in a largely grey landscape. The flight is unsettled, and Johanson’s unease returns. The movement away from Trondheim shifts the scale from streets and institutions toward the exposed coast and open water, where weather and sea conditions become harder to read or control.

The Fjord and the Tsunami

Trondheim’s geography initially seems to make it safer than more exposed coastal settlements. The fjord extends nearly forty kilometres inland before widening into a basin, with the city on its eastern shore. Several larger islands and a headland provide additional shelter. From a map, the arrangement might suggest that even a wave thirty metres high would not endanger the city. But the fjord is broader and its banks lower than those of Soigné Fjord; its widening course does not confine the water in the same way. The geography that appears protective cannot eliminate the force of the incoming surge.

By the time the tsunami reaches Trondheim, the seabed collapse has generated a wave that has travelled outward across the ocean. Near the slide, the wave had been unusually flat and difficult to detect amid the storm, reaching scarcely a metre above the water. At Trondheim, the threat becomes legible through its effects on the harbour and river. The wave sweeps across the harbour and flattens part of the old town. The Nid breaks its banks and floods Bakklandet and Møllenberg, carrying water through districts whose timber houses had defined the city’s picturesque character.

Kirkegata is struck directly. Johanson’s house is among those lost: its facade gives way, the roof collapses into the remains of the walls, and the debris is carried off by the torrent. The water’s force finally diminishes at the walls of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where it swirls before flowing back. That boundary does not make the university a refuge from the disaster so much as a visible limit to the flood’s reach. A place associated with scientific knowledge stands within the same landscape of exposure and damage as the surrounding residential streets.

Home, Loss, and the City’s Meaning

The contrast between Trondheim’s earlier domestic image and its inundation gives the destruction more than local significance. Before the disaster, the ochre house, white steps, nearby chapel, and Kirkegata setting suggest a rooted life within an old neighbourhood. A separate description of the chapel on a sunny Sunday morning returns to the same street and house in a composed, peaceful view. Set against the later account of the flood, these details make the damaged city not an abstract disaster zone but a lived environment of streets, homes, and familiar landmarks.

Johanson’s response after losing the house complicates the idea that home is simply a building. Asked whether he misses it, he says that less than he had expected: it was beautiful, but his life was not kept there. He recalls another house by a lake, where a veranda, water, music by Sibelius and Brahms, and good wine define the life he values. The answer does not undo the loss of Kirkegata or diminish the house’s earlier importance. Instead, it distinguishes the material home from the life and attachments that can persist elsewhere.

Trondheim consequently holds together two scales of vulnerability. Its university and research centre connect the city to the investigation of oceanic change, while the fjord and old districts reveal how little scientific modernity can insulate a coastal community from the sea. The flood reverses the reassuring impression of the sheltered city: islands, headland, and inland waters shape the wave but do not keep it out. Johanson’s destroyed house makes that reversal intimate, and his later reflection relocates home from a single building to a broader pattern of memory, landscape, and chosen life.