We're all aware of the environmental catastrophe of melting Arctic ice but I hadn't considered how it might impact on flight simming! I've just been reading a very interesting exchange on the Orbx forum between Holger Sandmann, who is creating the forthcoming Alaskan scenery, and a British geologist who has done extensive and recent work in Alaska and has offered Holger better data than he has for the project.
I thought that this excerpt from Holger's post was very sobering and frightening.
Holger Sandmann wrote:...as a fellow geographer I'm always keen to chat with others in my field, especially if they have local expertise, not to mention data. Feel free to PM me and we can take it from there.
The glaciers are in fact one of the reasons for the long delay in completing this project. It's absolutely astounding how rapidly most of them are receding. And it's not just the front end (terminus) but the entire ice volume meaning the elevation data across the glaciers and icefields, which in most cases are decades old, are often off by several hundred vertical feet, obviously leading to mismatches between the terrain mesh and the placement of the photoreal glaciers. That required serious digging for more recent data (partially successful) and many local adjustments. It's by far the most complex terrain mesh I've worked on and at this point contains over 100 sections of carefully blended segments.
Interestingly the Hubbard Glacier near McLeland Field works in the opposite way to nearly all glaciers and when they retreat it advances. It sometimes advances far enough to close off the Russell Fjord and make it into Russell Lake. The last time it happened the water level rose 30 feet before the pressure was sufficient to burst through the ice and murrain barrier and allow the water to flow again out into the sea. Of course I had not yet built McLeland Field when that happened so the 28.5 foot deep flood has not yet occurred
