Skel.gl has just opened an office in the Greenlandic capital Nuuk and is starting its work in Greenland through this collaboration.
Agroprojekt Ilua is the surveying company’s first project in the country. Skel.gl also has several offices in the rest of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the partnership marks a strong professional foundation for the Ilua project from the very first step.
“We are very pleased with Skel.gl’s support and assistance with our land allocation application,” says Julian H. Sonne, project lead on Agroprojekt Ilua.
“Skel.gl is a professional and highly competent partner, and we look forward to continuing the collaboration through the coming engineering and construction of our first prototype greenhouse.”
The partnership combines a contemporary development project with a long Danish-Greenlandic tradition of mapping Greenland — a country where precision has never been a choice, but a condition.
In Greenland, every project begins with the map. Not as a formality, but as a prerequisite. The terrain is vast, distances are long, and conditions are extreme. Areas cannot be assumed; they have to be documented, measured and properly delimited.
Land surveying is therefore not an administrative intermediary, but the foundation for all further planning — historically as well as today.
The mapping of Greenland has been a Danish-Greenlandic undertaking since the 17th and 18th centuries. With Hans Egede’s arrival in 1721, the need arose for reliable maps of coasts, fjords and settlements.
This work drew heavily on the deep place-knowledge of the Inuit — routes, place names and practical knowledge of landscape and ice — which formed the basis for the early maps and expeditions.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, mapping was gradually professionalised through state and scientific surveys, including The Danish Degree Measurement (Den Danske Gradmåling). Astronomical observations, triangulation and fixed reference points came into use, and Greenland emerged more clearly as a continuous landmass.
The decisive breakthrough came in the 20th century with aerial photography. The geologist Lauge Koch flew systematically over East Greenland, translating landscape into maps and knowledge. He himself articulated the basic condition of the work:
Lauge Koch repeatedly stressed that mapping in Greenland had to be precise from the very start, because errors could not be corrected by subsequent work.
That insight still holds.
When Skel.gl today works with surveying, GNSS and digital terrain models, it is a direct continuation of that tradition. The tools are new, but the requirements are the same: documentation that holds technically, legally, and over time.
For Agroprojekt Ilua, Skel.gl is responsible for the surveying and area documentation related to the application for land allocation at Narsarsuaq in Kommune Kujalleq. The work covers the precise delimitation of the project area as well as the map and documentation material that forms the basis for authority handling, engineering and the subsequent build.
Agroprojekt Ilua is a long-term, place-rooted project developed with respect for Greenland’s particular conditions. That Skel.gl has chosen to begin its Greenlandic work with Ilua is, to us, an expression of shared professionalism and mutual trust.
In Greenland, development always begins in the same place:
With a map, made properly.
Open work needs open backing. If this update was useful, help fund the next round of development in Narsarsuaq.