[2][3] He has developed an original viewpoint utilising a cross-disciplinary skillset that combines journalism, image making, mapping, documentary and exploration with a focus on contemporary issues and the climate emergency.
Through leading teams and working collaboratively, Thymann has partnered with institutions including NASA, the United Nations, World Glacier Monitoring Service and Danish Technical University – conceiving new methodologies and creating inventions along the way.
In 2020, Thymann discovered an abundance of corals in Jammer Bay, Denmark —a find that led him to spearhead a ground-breaking habitat mapping project with the Danish Technical University, in partnership with the local fishing community, funded by a €500,000 grant he secured from the Velux Foundation.
As a journalist, Thymann has conducted original reporting for BBC,[11] Bloomberg, CNN, the New York Times,[11] The Guardian,[12] Vice and many others[13] while working from conflict zones,[14] jungles, remote mountains, glaciers,[15] and the oceans.
He is a fellow at The Explorers Club of New York, a designation he earned through his significant discoveries, including finding corals in Danish waters,[18] prehistoric human bones deep inside a submerged Mexican cave system,[21] and an unexplored manatee habitat in the Yucatán.
[23] He has conducted the only scuba dive of the world's clearest lake in New Zealand,[10] documented tourism in Iraq, parkour in Gaza, the relocation of the Arctic town Kiruna In Sweden[24] and explored the glaciers of Uganda and Congo via new trekking routes.
[10][25][26] He is comfortable confronting the limits of the human body, both as a climber summiting oxygen-deprived peaks above 6300m[27] and as a technical diver capable of navigating in deep waters, below ice, and in narrow flooded caves.
For CNN, he travelled deep into Brazil’s Amazon,[31] past the frontier of deforestation, to show the conflict between an indigenous community and land grabbing ranchers.
[29] Thymann’s work in Mexico has taken him cave diving beneath illegal construction sites in the jungle and up close with cartels haunting the streets of Tulum for Vice[33] and New Scientist featuring his manatee habitat discovery.
In 2012, Thymann with his journalist colleague Ian Daly, and a team of nine local Ugandans spent 18 days detailing Rwenzori Mountains' glaciers from both sides of the range that lies on the equator.
[26] He has uncovered glaciers by trekking a new route into Congo and a applying historic maps onto a GPS device and Thymann's team traversed Congolese side of the range, where practically no one has been for decades because of insurgency and war.
He has led expeditions to Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, United States, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Uganda, Greenland, Iran, New Zealand, Nepal, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia.
[11] In an attempt to preserve an ice-grotto tourist attraction at the Rhône Glacier, local Swiss entrepreneurs wrapped a significant section of the ice-body in a thermal blanket.
[50] In early 2018, in their collaborative work, Simon Norfolk and Thymann address financial issues as driving forces behind human adaptation to the changing climate.
In addition, a thermal image time-lapse film was created, showing how glaciers compare to the surrounding landscape by only reacting to long-term temperature changes, as opposed to weather fluctuations.
[38] In 2020, Thymann led seafloor mapping project at Jammerbugt coast in Jutland, Denmark where he discovered an abundance of dead man’s fingers, the only soft coral found in Danish waters.