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Arctic Explorers Retreat From Hostile Waters With Oil Prices Low

January 14, 2015

Arctic Explorers Retreat From Hostile Waters With Oil Prices Low

When Statoil ASA (STL) acquired the last of three licenses off Greenland’s west coast in January 2012, oil at more than $110 a barrel made exploring the iceberg-ridden waters an attractive proposition.

Less than two years later, the price of oil had been cut by almost half and Norway’s Statoil, the world’s most active offshore Arctic explorer in 2014, relinquished its interest in all three licenses in December without drilling a single well, Knut Rostad, a spokesman for the state-controlled company, said by e-mail.

Statoil’s decision shows how the plunge in oil, with Brent crude trading at about $45 a barrel, has dealt another blow to companies and governments hoping to tap the largely unexplored Arctic. That threatens to demote the importance of a region already challenged by high costs, environmental concerns, technological obstacles and, in the case of Russia, international sanctions.

“At $50, it just doesn’t make sense,” James Henderson, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said in a Jan. 12 phone interview. “Arctic exploration has almost certainly been significantly undermined for the rest of this decade.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Satellite Provides Sharper Picture of Shrinking Ice Sheet – Truthdig

December 28, 2014

Satellite Provides Sharper Picture of Shrinking Ice Sheet – Truthdig.

LONDON—Greenland’s ice sheet shrank by an average of 243 billion tonnes a year between 2003 and 2009—a rate of melting that is enough to raise the world’s sea levels by 0.68 mm per year.

In what is claimed as the first detailed study, geologist Beata Csatho, of the University of Buffalo in the US, and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they used satellite and aerial data to reconstruct changes in the ice sheet at 100,000 places, and to confirm that the process of losing 277 cubic kilometres of ice a year is more complex than anyone had predicted.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest body of ice on Earth—second only to Antarctica—and its role in the machinery of the northern hemisphere climate is profound.

Careful measurements

It has been closely studied for decades, but such are the conditions in the high Arctic that researchers have tended to make careful measurements of ice melt and glacier calving in fixed locations—in particular, at four glaciers—and then try to estimate what that might mean for the island as a whole.

“The great importance of our data is that, for the first time, we have acomprehensive picture of how all of Greenland’s glaciers have changed over the past decade,” Dr Csatho said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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