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[OMG: Oceans Melting Greenland]
[Josh Willis] There's enough ice here in Greenland
to raise sea levels by 25 feet,
all the way around the world.
It's an incredible amount of ice,
and it's melting and adding to sea level rise.
For Oceans Melting Greenland, what we really want to do is
measure the oceans,
measure the ice,
and watch them change together year on year
and try and answer the question,
how much are the oceans melting away the ice
as opposed to the air which is what most people studied so far.
It's really a breathtaking landscape.
These giant mountains and canyons are all along the coast.
When you look out the window, you really get a sense of just
how huge these glaciers are, these gigantic rivers of ice
that are draining the ice out of Greenland into the ocean.
And then they reach the ocean, then it's gets all broken and
craggy and big chunks fall off.
It's incredibly dramatic.
Kulusuk is just a tiny little town in southeast Greenland,
and we've been launching probes out of here for the
past four or five days.
It's already been a fantastic year for OMG
measuring the oceans.
We launch 'em right out of this tube right over here.
Open up the tube, you can look right down it and see the water
passing by, or sometimes the icebergs, or clouds,
or whatever it is we are flying over.
[Man on Radio] Six
Five
[Willis] We slow down a little bit, and we just push these
big grey cylinders out of the bottom of the plane,
and they fall to the ocean
and measure the temperature and salinity
when they get there and radio it back to the plane.
We're really trying to look at the ice and the ocean
all the way around Greenland, so we're dropping 250 profilers.
We're going to cover the coastline all the way around,
and in the spring we map out the glaciers with a radar
also all the way around.
So we're really looking at mapping all of the ocean-ice
interactions in Greenland as best we can with one mission.
What we care about with OMG really is
the breaking off at the edges.
As the water eats away at the ice then it can actually
speed up that breaking off part.
And when you dump more ice in the oceans,
then it causes sea level rise.
So, OMG is really here to try and figure out
how much are the oceans doing?
How much is this kind of breaking off of the ice,
it's called calving,
how important is that relative to
the melting at the surface?
And more importantly, is the ocean causing some of this
speed up of the calving.
We think it is, but how widespread is it
and how big an impact?
Even the smallest iceberg looks gigantic
when you're right next to it.
We saw an iceberg that was grounded in the bay.
Remember, 90 percent of the iceberg is below sea level.
So, if there's about ten meters, or about thirty feet of ice
above sea level, then 300 feet are below.
It's a reminder that a lot of the stuff we're trying to
measure is hidden below the surface of the ocean,
hidden below the surface of the ice,
and peering down into both of those
is really at the core of what OMG is trying to do.
Every time a ton of ice comes off of Greenland,
sea level goes up a tiny little bit
and it's coming off Greenland at billions of tons per year.
It's interesting to meet some of the Greenlandic folks
who have been here their whole lives.
They've all watched the glaciers
literally vanish before their eyes.
They didn't need satellites and airplanes and scientists
to tell them that Greenland was melting.
They look out and see the glacier used to be here
and now it's way up there.
Sea level rise is really a global problem.
It's something we can't just ignore.
Two thirds of the planet are covered by the oceans,
and it's really the same ocean.
I mean if ice is lost here,
seal level rises back home in Los Angeles,
it rises in Southeast Asia, in Australia,
all across the planet.
Being here and seeing the ice disappearing and literally
watching it fall into the ocean is really profound,
and I think it's something that I, I hope that
we help people understand with OMG
that we all live on the same planet,
and it's changing and we need to know how.
[NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology]