The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

Yesterday I was discussing some of the political problems that are likely to make gas and oil supplies an ongoing news story for a few years yet. There is, however, also a potentially growing physical problem that might also impact the logistics of supply somewhat faster than we might think.

This other problem is actually related to reading some of the conditions of the Iditarod which started this week. Because of the changes in snow patterns there are parts of the course that have almost no snow

Where an avalanche last year killed Richard Strick, Jr. -- a well-liked, longtime volunteer trailbreaker for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race -- there is little snow this year. Efforts have been under way for days to cut a trail through thickets of alder and willow that would normally be buried in white, said pilot Barry Stanley of Denali Flying Service in Willow.

UPDATE: I have added a small addition at the end of the post, following comments.

Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier

I've been trying this week to get a grip on the science of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It's a complex and poorly understood business, but there seems to be enough meat here that I think it should be on The Oil Drum agenda.

We might do worse than start with with a report from the BBC. They covered a talk at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this last week. (I didn't get to go, alas).

Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier on the east coast of Greenland has been clocked using GPS equipment and satellites to be flowing at a rate of 14km per year. It is also losing mass extremely fast, with its front end retreating 5km back up its fjord this year alone. The glacier "drains" about 4% of the ice sheet, dumping tens of cubic km of fresh water in the North Atlantic.

"We've seen a 5km retreat of the terminus, we've see an almost 300% acceleration in the flow speed and we've seen about a 100m thinning of the glacier - all occurring in the last one or so years," said Dr Gordon Hamilton, of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.