we've been watching greenland melt for
25 or 30 years now and you can see the
surface melt every year from satellite
data we know the weather pretty well we
know when it gets warm enough to melt
the ice but looking at the glaciers
around the edges these fast-moving
rivers of ice that dump ice into the
ocean it started to become clear oceans
could actually play a role in
controlling those glaciers and so
ocean's melting greenland or omg for
short was born as a way to try and
answer the question
how much are the oceans controlling the
glaciers how much are they causing them
to dump extra ice and what does this
mean for the future of the ice sheet
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greenland has enough ice to raise sea
levels by 25 feet if it all melted today
the ice sheet is ten thousand feet tall
in the middle and you fly over it in a
jet for two hours and you're still on
top of it so
it's
an
enormous chunk of ice and something that
is a big part of our climate system
so by 8 o'clock we'll figure out if
we're going to go north
if we don't go north today then we have
to hit it hard
wednesday to go north and then leave for
too late on thursday because the weather
is not looking good it's always an
adventure doing work in greenland and
it's uh it never works out exactly like
you planned it you really have to pick
your places very carefully where you're
going to be able to land stay a couple
of nights get fuel for the airplane of
course the schedule almost immediately
gets thrown out the window because the
weather's bad or you know one of a
hundred other things could go wrong and
the last two years we also had to deal
with covid it was just one more of a
hundred other challenges
of getting this crew in this airplane to
measure the ocean temperatures really
all along greenland's coastline once a
year for six years
we started with a ship the ship drove
around the edges of greenland and mapped
the sea floor the water there remember
is upside down you've got the cold water
at the top and the warm water down below
so if the warm water is going to reach
the glaciers and interact with them the
glaciers have to be sitting in warm
water and there has to be some deep
water that connects the glacier with the
water offshore so the first couple of
years we really just mapped the sea
floor and we revolutionized our
knowledge of the seafloor depth around
the island huge areas had just never
been mapped and we had no idea how deep
they were so with the data collected by
omg we now know not just which glaciers
are reacting to the ocean but why
they're reacting and it's almost always
because they're sitting in deep water
and there's a deep channel connecting
into the offshore
when we were flying around measuring the
oceans you drop this cylinder out of the
airplane it falls on a little parachute
and when it hits the water it separates
into two parts and one part stays at the
surface and it radios data back to the
plane and another part sinks and we get
one profile of the temperature and the
saltiness of the ocean from the surface
all the way down to the seafloor because
we really want to know what that deep
water is doing because that's the water
that melts the glaciers
we dropped those things
about 200 times a year covering the
entire area around greenland so we have
a snapshot of what the oceans looked
like
what we've shown during the course of
omg is that the glaciers are paying a
lot of attention to the oceans
these are magnificent enormous rivers of
ice that empty into the sea water but
they're not disconnected from what's
happening in the oceans when the oceans
warm they retreat more quickly when they
cool sometimes they even grow and these
glaciers are often sitting in a lot
deeper water than we've realized
previously that means they're a lot more
threatened by the water and greenland
has the potential to raise sea levels
much higher than we previously knew so
basically every time we made a big
discovery on omg
we had to raise the bar on our
predictions of sea level rise from
greenland without the ocean's role in
melting away the ice you're you're only
getting half the story
i started working on omg in 2012 almost
10 years of my life and i've definitely
grown as a scientist i started with one
idea of greenland as a
pretty simple block of ice of course
it's a fantastically complicated and
interesting you see these sharp mountain
ridges where the ice has just
cut a channel right through it there's
giant icebergs
the glaciers are
literally moving so you can't see them
with your naked eye but if you go back
from one year to the next you can see
how they've changed it's really a
dynamic place and that's part of the
reason it's so scientifically
interesting but of course it's just
beautiful to look at too
if you talk to greenlandic folks who
have been living near these glaciers and
whose families have been watching these
glaciers for generations they know that
the glaciers are shrinking we found that
they wanted to know about the science
and what we were finding almost as much
as we did they're living in a landscape
that's that's changing probably more
dramatically than anywhere else on earth
this is an important place it's
important for the entire world
as ice is lost in greenland sea level
goes up everywhere it's literally all
around the planet is affected by what
happens in greenland and so it's going
to shape a lot of our future too not
just the green landing folks