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Four months of the year and the Helsinki Peninsula disappears under a white blanket of snow, 

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masking the division of land and sea. 

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And yet, the Finnish capital keeps its skies and water and streets moving. 

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The key to keeping on top of it all is good snow-how.

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Snow clearance in Helsinki is a virtual military operation. 

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Every 10 seconds, a truck arrives, dumps its snow and leaves. 

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Only with this sort of precision can they keep the city moving in the depths of winter.

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This winter season, Helsinki has had its thickest snow cover in more than 50 years. 

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Day and night, snow plows trawl Helsinki's streets, shoveling and relocating 5,000 truckloads of snow every 24 hours. 

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Almost a third of the wasted snow ends up in the sea, where tugboats circle continuously, helping it melt away.

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If you stop this for 10 minutes, this freezes over, and that's it, that's the end.

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Another 3,000 loads get dumped daily on land. 

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It creates Helsinki's artificial mountain range of snow.

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Those who live here are expected to play their part, too.

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Whose snow is this?

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Well, this is actually if the snow is on the street, on the driveway, it's the city's snow. 

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But as soon as we plough it, then it becomes the property's.

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Knocking the ice off the roof is of crucial importance. 

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Just recently a large chunk of ice fell from a building and killed the man walking beneath.

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Unlike many of its European neighbors, Vantaa Airport stayed operational throughout winter. 

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It prides itself on having an infallible maintenance program.

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Thanks to this specialized fleet of machines, this slick operation can clear a runway in as little as four minutes. 

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The last time Helsinki Airport shut was in 2003, and that was for a mere 30 minutes.

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Helsinki has barriers that have restricted its growth. 

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On the one side there are the existing buildings, but then you have the water. 

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So, between the buildings and the harbor, there really is only one place to go -- down below.

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That's exactly what they're doing. 

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In efforts to avoid urban sprawl and maintain the low-rise cityscape, Helsinki is taking advantage of its natural resources to expand.

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What makes underground Helsinki possible is this hard bedrock that's shallow enough beneath the ground to be usable. 

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It allows the city planners to create these huge infrastructures that, frankly, look like something out of The Flintstones.

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This policy of putting industrial facilities beneath the surface helps free up land above ground for more profitable real estate development. 

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Perhaps the most extensive use of the bedrock is within the city's district heating and cooling system;

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60 kilometers of tunnels deep beneath the surface bring heat and hot water to Helsinki.

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The magnificent Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral is proof that no part of Helsinki remains untouched by the underground city. 

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The old and the new coming together, whether it's the pipes providing the heat for the worshipers here, 

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or the revolution going on down below in the cathedral's bomb shelter.

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Thirty meters beneath the surface, 

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two Finnish companies have joined forces and created the world's greenest data center of its time.

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In most data centers, just half of the energy consumed is used by the computers themselves. 

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The rest is used to cool the computers down.

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What's different with us, 

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we're using seawater, which is cold, obviously, here in Finland, and that's the way how we cool it efficiently. 

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We don't use electricity to cool them down. 

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So, basically, we save a lot [of] electricity in that way and also energy. 

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What we're doing, we're actually taking the excess heat and putting that to [the] district heating network and warming Helsinki homes.

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The excess heat leaves the data center through pipes, 

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which carry it 70 meters down to the underground tunneling network that lies beneath Helsinki. 

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From here, that heat continues its journey through the pipes and arrives at its final destination, 

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heating people's homes and water. 

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Its journey travels through the world's largest heat pump of its kind. 

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Of course, it's also underground.

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Hide the industrial bits you don't want to see deep underground. 

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Reduce your carbon footprint and free up space on the surface, for the good life by the sea. 

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It's hard to argue with this sort of "Future City".