The airborne mission, Oceans Melting Greenland or OMG of NASA, concludes its six-year mission that's helping to find out through its measurements how rapidly sea level will rise in the next years, up to the next five decades.
A Phys.org specified, this week marks the beginning of OMG's mission, specifically its final survey of glaciers flowing from Greenland into the ocean.
The melting glaciers of Greenland currently add to more freshwater to rise in sea level than any other does.
Specifically, the glaciers melt six to seven times faster at present compared to how they were just more than two decades ago, and OMG is the first mission of NASA to focus exclusively on what the ocean is contributing to their ice loss.
Such a mission is a crucial part of helping in improving calculations of future melt rates for coastal communities to take opportune safety measures to limit the damage from higher seas.
Warmer Water Makes Ice Melt Faster
According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ice is melting faster in water than it does in colder water, although prior to the OMG mission, the temperature of the ocean water that touches the over 200 coastal glaciers of Greenland was generally unknown.
Simply gauging the temperature at the ocean surface is not enough. The ocean's upper level around Greenland comprises largely Arctic meltwater, and it is extremely cold, sometimes with a below-freezing temperature.
Approximately 600 or 700 feet down is a layer of warmer and saltier water that's carried northward from less-frigid latitudes.
The only way scientists have to measure temperature is by dropping a probe into the water and allow it to sink, as no satellite device can peer deep into the ocean. Since 2016, that is what the OMG team has been working on every summer.
The OMG Project
This year, Josh Willis, Principal Investigator of Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in Southern California, and OMG Ian McCubbin, OMG Project Manager, also from JPL, are set to fly around the whole coast of Greenland, with a crew of engineers and pilot, in a specifically modified DC-3 aircraft.
From early next month through the beginning or middle of September, the two will drop probes out of the plane's belly into the ocean at roughly 300 target sites in front of glaciers.
As the said probes go underwater, they transfer temperature and salinity readings through radio waves to the plane above until they reach the ocean floor.
A Fortunate Opportunity for NASA
Since the switch may remain in the same location for decades, scientists of NASA's OMG Project felt fortunate to see the drastic change, specifically when they observed how it impacted the largest glacier of Greenland, the Jakobshavn also known as Sermeq Kujalleq.
Essentially, the glacier had been shrinking fast and disappearing nearly two miles inland yearly. However, the colder water revived Sermeq Kujalleq; it started growing and advancing toward the ocean.
Last year, the team discovered that warm water started returning to the west coast of Greenland, and Jakobshavn appeared to be returning to its loss and disappearing pattern before.
The team knew then; there was more for them to discover. With one more year of observations, they may have the chance of seeing the ocean change dramatically and find out the ice reacts to it, explained Willis.
According to OMG program scientist at NASA, Nadya Vinogradova-Shiffer, it was a fortunate opportunity for the space agency to observe an unusual phenomenon around Greenland as the North Atlantic Ocean was going through a switch towards colder waters from being in a warm phase for almost two decades.
A similar report about NASA's OMG is shown on JPLraw's YouTube video below:
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