Engineer Elden Johnson, seen here giving a pipeline talk in 2008.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

In 1973, Elden Johnson was a young engineer with a job working on one of the most ambitious and uncertain projects in the world — an 800-mile steel pipeline that carried warm oil over frozen ground. Thirty-five years later, Johnson looked back at what he called “the greatest story ever told of man’s interaction with permafrost.”

Glaciologist Chris Larsen took this photo of surging, cracked-up Bering Glacier in 2010. The glacier may have stopped its several-year period of get-up-and-go.

Chris Larsen photo.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the thirteenth straight year, I’m happy to be spending one week of December here, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where more than 15,000 scientists gather for a week to discuss the latest news of the world.

Here are a few items from the first two days:

Ryan Cassotto, left, of the University of New Hampshire and Martin Truffer of the University of Alaska use radar to monitor “KNS” glacier in Greenland in summer 2011.

Photo courtesy Martin Truffer.

Using some of the great datasets available today, Mark Fahnestock figured the average winter temperatures of the Arctic from the time he was born until he was 10 years old. He compared that data to the same period in his son’s life, finding the Arctic has warmed about five degrees since Fahnestock was his son’s age. All that warmth affects things, the scientist said at a recent meeting in Fairbanks.

Rime frost on a twig off Alaska’s Elliot Highway in October.

Photo by Ned Rozell

Beneath a sky of stars and hazy aurora, the heat of an
October day shimmers upward. The next morning, leaves, moss and tundra plants
are woven into a carpet of white frost; a skin of ice creeps over the surface
of lakes. Alaska is freezing once again, responding to the planet’s nod away
from the sun and signaling one of the biggest changes of the year.

A “debris flow” creeping down the southern Brooks Range toward the Dalton Highway.

Photo by Ronald Daanen.

A few years ago, Ronald Daanen was driving north of Coldfoot on the
Dalton Highway, looking for drunken trees. He pulled over when he saw
some tipsy spruce on a hillside.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist thought
the tilted trees would be a classic sign of thawing permafrost, ground
that has remained frozen through the heat of at least two summers. But
these trees were part of something larger — a giant tongue of moving
hillside that was oozing toward the Dalton Highway.