Tag: OMG

By Lara Streiff

Despite racing against impending harsh weather conditions, a red and white World War II aircraft flew slowly and steadily over the icy waters surrounding Greenland in August and September. Three weeks delayed by pandemic restrictions, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory inside this retrofitted DC-3 plane started dropping hundreds of probes as part of an annual expedition known as the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) Project.

Since 2016, the OMG project has conducted numerous flights over the waters near Greenland’s lengthy and jagged coastline. They drop roughly 250 probes each year (though they managed a record 346 during this extraordinary 2020 expedition) which then relay temperature and salinity data. The team uses this information to help determine how much the surrounding ocean is contributing to Greenland’s ice melt.

“The glaciers are reacting very strongly to the ocean and we ignore that at our peril,” said JPL scientist and principal investigator Josh Willis. “The oceans have the potential to melt the ice very quickly and drive the sea level rise even higher than we expected.”

If it all melted, Greenland’s ice could contribute as much as 25 feet of sea level rise—though Willis assures us that this is not expected within the next year, or even the next 100 years. The big question that his team is trying to help answer is rather the speed at which the ice is melting.

Unlike icebergs—which float in water—glaciers sit atop a land mass, seemingly exposed and vulnerable to the warming atmosphere. While the atmosphere is a significant factor, it is not solely responsible for glacial melt. As the glaciers in Greenland start to ooze off the island in massive rivers of ice, they carve fjords into the landscape until they finally connect with the sea. While surface waters are generally frigid, the warmer ocean waters from below can cause the glacier to melt more quickly and speed up the amount of ice that drains off the land into the ocean.

Though the coronavirus pandemic had sweeping impacts across the globe, it didn’t halt environmental processes like Greenland’s glacial ice melt. It also didn’t impede the resolve of the OMG scientists to continue their work.

Starting in March up until the day they landed in Greenland on August 24, Willis says he wasn’t sure they would be able to collect their data this year. But cooperation between the various stakeholders, including NASA, the State Department, and the governments of Canada and Greenland, was key. Willis also gives credit to a huge amount of hard work by OMG’s Project Manager, Ian McCubbin of JPL, for making it possible. “If it wasn’t for McCubbin,” said Willis, “we’d still be sitting on our couches.”

Coordinating the scientists and equipment necessary for any expedition requires a great deal of planning, and the additional pandemic-related precautions made everything just a little bit more complicated.

“It was like a whole new layer, after you go across the border and go through customs and boarder control, now you also go through coronavirus screening,” Willis said.

In addition to getting tested a whopping seven times, two of which took place before even stepping foot in Greenland, Willis and the other members of the OMG team were very cautious. There was an initial isolation period after landing on the island during which they could fortunately work on the plane and equipment preparation, wearing masks when traveling to and from the site and no contact with locals. Greenland has had very few cases of COVID, and doesn’t have enough hospitals to handle any outbreaks, so the team was especially conscious of limiting their interactions with people there.

One exception was communicating with the nurses conducting their COVID-19 tests. “It was quite an experience getting tested this many times,” said Willis, “but the most fun was actually with nurses in Greenland, who were very nice and asked about our mission, so we got to tell them about what OMG was doing—and I suspect they followed along the rest of our journey on social media.”

Though some legs of the scientists’ expedition were delayed or more challenging as a result, Willis says it was well worth the extra effort to ensure everyone’s safety.

The outcome turned out to be a banner year for the project, despite the late start. Instead of heading north at the beginning of the month, it was already well into August when Project Manager Ian McCubbin and the three scientists from JPL—Ian Fenty, Mike Wood, and Willis himself—were able to meet with their flight crew from Kenn Borek Air.

Once they were on the ground in Greenland, their main concern was for the conditions they might encounter once back in the air.

“Weather starts to get pretty rough in September, and very rough in October.” said Willis. Fortunately, they were able wrap up their surveys by mid-September, mostly dodging the snow, sleet and wind that might impede their ability to drop all of the probes. “It was a sprint to the finish line, but we were able to accomplish everything we wanted to do and more.”

In fact, the team encountered unusually good conditions in the north east parts of the island, where ice and fog usually prevent access. As a result, they measured some glaciers that had never been sampled before.

When the project first began in 2016, the scientists also flew a jet with a radar strapped on the bottom to measure big swaths of glaciers from above, but NASA’s ICESat-2, an Earth-observing satellite that measures the mass of ice sheets and glaciers down to the inch that launched in 2018, takes care of that part of the mission now.

More than 45 scientific papers have now been published based on OMG data, with several more in progress. Willis says that every new discovery reminds them that the oceans are more important than they ever thought possible.

This year they noted new observations of Greenland’s largest glacier Jakobshavn, which has been closely monitored since the start of the project in 2016. In the first couple of years, the water near Jakobshavn cooled by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees C)—a whole lot for a block of ice according to Willis. That cooling slowed the melting of the glacier, which then started growing instead. But early this year warm water returned to Jakobshavn and the recent observations suggest it is now thinning once again.

These continued discoveries from the project are very exciting for the scientists and organizations involved. Because of this, the OMG project has gotten approval to continue its research beyond the original end date, meaning that Willis and his crew will again be making their way back to Greenland next August, and this time hopefully without much delay.

by Carol Rasmussen / NORTHWEST GREENLAND /

If you remember the movie Titanic, this looks like a terrible place for a cruise. But to a captain with a lifetime of experience navigating around Greenland, it was a safe passage. And to scientist Ian Fenty of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, it was a great place for research.

Ian is a co-investigator for NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign, a five-year project to measure the effects of ocean water on Greenland’s rapidly melting glaciers. In August, he was the sole OMG representative on a research cruise to glacier fronts in northwest Greenland. And where there are glaciers, there are icebergs.

Through a professional connection with marine biologist Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington, Seattle, Ian had an opportunity to join the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources’ (GINR) week-long research cruise in northwestern Greenland. Malene Juul Simon of GINR’s Climate Division and Laidre planned the trip to deploy underwater acoustic instruments at glacier fronts — an important habitat for narwhals. These long-toothed Arctic whales navigate and hunt by making clicking sounds and listening to the echoes bouncing off nearby rocks or prey. The acoustic instruments pick up the narwhals’ sounds, documenting their activity at the glacier fronts.

The GINR instruments are attached to moorings—lines more than half a mile long, with a half-ton anchor at one end and the instruments and floats attached at intervals to the other end. Ian realized that adding OMG sensors of water temperature and salinity to the lines would produce a unique local dataset for OMG and benefit the narwhal research as well. The scientists agreed to collaborate, and Ian joined the team in Upernavik, Greenland, for an eight-day cruise.

Getting close to glacier fronts means encountering icebergs. Although Greenland’s bergs don’t match Antarctica’s for sheer size, the island’s fjords and shallow waters are littered with everything from modest lumps to tablelands that dwarf the 106-foot-long (32.3-meter-long) Sanna.

“The captain was an expert pilot, with decades of experience in this kind of ship,” Ian said. “It was mesmerizing to watch them navigate through a field of icebergs to get to the instrument sites. His concentration was really impressive.” The crew usually work on fishing trawlers that are at sea for weeks, often in much worse weather than the researchers encountered.

Once at a proposed site, the researchers had to decide whether a mooring could survive there for two years. “There were some places that looked good on paper, but when you got there, you could see that they were on the iceberg highway,” Ian said –meaning  a current carrying icebergs from a glacier’s calving front.

An iceberg can not only rip the line off the anchor, it can drag the entire mooring out to sea, anchor and all. One mooring from Southeast Greenland washed up in Scotland, almost 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) away.

If the planned site looked dicey, the researchers would look for a nearby spot protected by an island or other feature that was still close to the calving front and deep enough to be attractive to narwhals. When they had agreed on a new site, the researchers programmed their instruments, and the crew tied them on the line.

Then they dropped the whole assembly, surface end first, along a course about a kilometer long. When the anchor dropped, it pulled the line into the proper vertical orientation.

The ocean environment may have been wild, but the ship was civilized. The six researchers and six crew were supplied with wifi, meals to suit both Greenlandic and European tastes, wet and dry labs, and comfortable bunkrooms.

“I have to give a lot of credit to Kristen and Malene for organizing the team,” Ian said. “It was a fantastic experience to work with so many different researchers in related but different areas. Pick any random pair, and they would be explaining something new to each other. The camaraderie was great. We definitely were collectively more than the sum of our parts.”

Ian will return next summer to change batteries on his instruments. The moorings are equipped to help the researchers find them among next summer’s icebergs. “There’s a simple mechanism that sits just above the anchor and listens for a specific tone sequence,” Ian said. “When we come up in the ship, we play that song and boom! It lets go of the line, and the line comes up to the surface. The mooring has a satellite phone, and it sends its current coordinates to us by email.

“I’ll be getting email from my instrument. That’ll be a special day.”

By Carol Rasmussen / KULUSUK, GREENLAND /

Kulusuk Island is breathtakingly beautiful — a spectacular mountain backdrop, quaint village, turquoise icebergs, even adorable sled-dog puppies. But Oceans Melting Greenland Project Manager Steve Dinardo didn’t choose it as a base because of the scenery. “We came here to work,” he says.

Kulusuk is ideally located for surveying East Greenland, which the locals call the wild side of the island — even more remote and unpopulated than the west coast. But the weather changes quickly, and the little airport doesn’t have a hangar to protect the research plane. If you have any trouble here, you could be stuck for quite a while. Every day in the field is expensive, and winter is just around the corner.

So the five OMG team members push themselves to get as much done as possible each day.

To begin with, they fly as many hours as they legally can to collect data. After the plane lands, there are still hours of work ahead. The plane is fueled and checked over for the next flight, Steve looks at multiple weather forecasting models to create a forecast for Kulusuk and the probe-drop areas, and Principal Investigator Josh Willis comes up with science priorities to match the weather. Both may end up revising their plans multiple times before the next morning’s fly/no fly decision.

Add to this list trying to stay in touch with family at home, answering a few pressing emails, eating, showering and so on. No wonder that some days, the team gets no more than a few glimpses of the incredible landscape out of plane and hotel windows.

“It’s more of an adventure in retrospect,” Josh summarized. “While you’re there, you have your head down and you’re working as hard as you can. When you get a day off, you sleep.”

The team has already had the one mandatory day off that it will get in Kulusuk. As far as I could tell, everyone filled it almost as full as the work days. At dinner, several team members did mention a nap, but they also spent some of their precious free time out in the Arctic landscape. Jakob Ipsen, manager of the Hotel Kulusuk, found a villager to take senior pilot Andy Ferguson fishing and another who took four of us to see a nearby glacier. Later, Jakob drove a few team members to the highest point on the island to watch the sunset.

The next morning, it was back to business. Steve gave a favorable weather forecast at 7 a.m., and the team took off for another eight-hour research flight about an hour later. They flew north to Scoresby Sund and dropped another 10 probes in key fjords, for a total of 99 drops in five days. Only 150 more to go.

by Carol Rasmussen / KULUSUK, GREENLAND /

“Incredibly majestic.”

After years of intensive research on Greenland’s glaciers, Josh Willis is standing next to one for the first time in his life. Apusiaajik isn’t one of Greenland’s giants — in fact, its name means “little glacier.” But its marbled blue-and-white wall of ice is tall, long and, as Willis says, majestic.

It’s also melting. From time to time there’s a loud cracking noise, and seconds later, a few refrigerator-sized chunks of ice drop into the ocean. You can’t help wondering when a larger chunk will fall, and how much icy water will hit you when it does. It’s natural for glaciers to lose ice this way, though disconcerting when you’re in the neighborhood. But Apusiaajik is like most of Greenland’s glaciers, it’s out of balance — melting faster than it can be replenished by winter snowfall.

We’re visiting the little glacier on a down day for NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign. It’s close to Kulusuk, a tiny village on Greenland’s east coast that happens to have an airport with a 4,000-foot-long gravel runway. That’s too short for a big jet to take off and land. But for OMG’s converted DC-3, the Kulusuk airport is perfectly located for the mission’s survey flights around southeastern Greenland, studying how ocean water is affecting glaciers like Apusiaajik.

OMG is on its third annual campaign out of a planned five. The goal each year is to blanket Greenland’s continental shelf with probes measuring the seawater’s temperature and salinity. This year, the team has already dropped 89 out of 250 probes, starting at the southern tip of Greenland and working up the east coast. Soon it’ll be time to move north to the next base.

Halfway through OMG’s expected lifespan, what have scientists learned, and what do they still hope to find out?

“We’re beginning to see the signs of long-term changes on Greenland’s continental shelf — changes that take years to happen,” Willis says. “We’ve never seen that before.” Daily changes in water temperature come and go, but the OMG scientists are finding that glaciers react more strongly to slow changes in water temperature far below the ocean surface.

Greenland’s continental shelf is shallow, averaging about 1,600 feet (500 meters) deep. But it’s gashed by troughs carved by ancient glaciers, which can be two times deeper than that. These troughs are natural conduits for deep water to get up on the shelf, but it’s not an easy passage. Sills and underwater mountains within the troughs impede the flow and create basins.

Willis gestures at the ice-flecked channel flowing past Apusiaajik. “In a couple of weeks, all this water will be way downstream,” he says. “In the troughs and basins on the shelf, that’s not true. They’re almost like tide pools — the water comes in at high tide and stays there till the tide comes back. In those deep basins, instead of twice per day like the tide, it’s more like once per year and sometimes less. And when warm or cold water gets in, it stays for years.” There’s not always enough variation in the seawater from winter or summer for water to get into the basins each year; it may take a change in a large-scale ocean climate pattern, similar to an El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean, to trigger the change.

For the last two years, the North Atlantic has been moving into a naturally cooler climate phase. Willis is eager to see when and how far the cooler water will move up the West Greenland coast, and how long it will last.

Answering those questions will chip away at the big remaining goal of OMG: quantifying how much glacial ice melt will result from any given change in ocean temperature. If water comes onto the continental shelf that’s a degree Celsius warmer than now, how much will the melt rate increase? What about three degrees?

Ice-filled channel in front of Apusiaajik Glacier. The surface ocean layer is much colder than the deep water below. Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech

“One of the advantages of watching a glacier change year after year after year is that you begin to get an idea of what’s driving the change. If it’s the ocean, I think we’ll be able to quantify that with two more years of OMG data,” Willis says.

“That’s what we set out to do. What I’m really excited about is that it’s beginning to happen.”

by Carol Rasmussen / KEFLAVIK, ICELAND /

“Svalbard was really nice. Thule was really cold. Kangerlussuaq was really small. We’re still trying to figure out what Iceland is really.”

That’s principal investigator Josh Willis’ capsule description of the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign so far. Approaching the end of a month-long deployment in the Arctic, the team members are pacing themselves to finish their mission without running out of energy, patience or clean socks. It’s been a marathon campaign, relocating to a new base every few days, each one in a different time zone.

But there are compensations. Even the been-everywhere, seen-everything crew of the NASA G-III has been impressed by the spectacular Arctic scenery.

Few people on Earth have seen as much of the Greenland coast as this team. It’s a dramatic coastline scored with hundreds of fjords. Many contain glaciers—the places where warm subsurface ocean waters may have a chance to melt Greenland’s ice from below. Behind the fjords is a jumble of rock, snow and ice, and in front is ice and water. The OMG crew has now dropped about 180 of its planned 250 probes in open water within fjords, along the coastline and out onto the continental shelf.

The team has been operating out of four bases: Thule, in northwest Greenland; Kangerlussuaq, in southwest Greenland; the island of Svalbard, Norway; and their current location in Keflavik, Iceland. The bases allow them to stay close to whatever part of the coast they’re measuring rather than wasting fuel flying for hours across the huge island from a single base. Each base is in a different time zone, and the farthest jump is five hours’ difference.

What about jetlag?

“With so many time changes, I don’t try to adapt,” said flight engineer Phil Vaughn. “I sleep when I’m sleepy.”

Blizzard season starts in mid-September in cold Thule. This being an air base, storms are ranked using the air controller’s alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie or Delta. One night, the OMG crew watched conditions deteriorate to Charlie—complete lockdown. “The winds blow snow from the local icecaps so thick that it decreases visibility and it’s dangerous to be outside,” Willis said. “You don’t go outside at all. We used the time to get a little bit of outside work done and answer emails.” The storm lasted about 20 hours.

Having that much time for anything but work was something of a luxury on a field campaign. The crew is required to take a “hard down” day after every six flight days, giving them a chance to catch up on sleep or chores. But in a new location, one day may not be enough to find fresh produce, do laundry or pick up supplies that have run out. Hotels offer most of these services, but the fee can be hefty. One crew member grumbled that he was charged $90 for a small load of laundry at an earlier stop.

When I asked what happens if someone gets sick, the crew just looked at me. Finally, flight engineer Terry Lee said, “You try to stay away from the other people.” That’s not physically possible in a small plane. But staying home isn’t an option either.

OMG’s mission success makes up for a lot of inconveniences, though. After weeks of practice and with the keen eyes of the pilots, Willis and the team have gotten very good at finding alternate drop locations in thick ice or cloud cover. Engineers Lee and Vaughn have become expert marksmen at hitting small patches of water. And though the scenery is undeniably jaw-dropping, Willis’ favorite sight from the entire trip is something quite different. “After we dropped one probe, we did a very steep bank and started to climb. I looked over my shoulder and saw a tiny splash. I think that was our probe hitting the water.”

by Carol Rasmussen / KEFLAVIK, ICELAND /

The first thing you notice about the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) crew is the shared memories. “Where did we get that great pizza—Thule?”

“No, at the little restaurant in Svalbard, remember?”

The next is a story that begins “When we were in . . . ” could continue anywhere: Kazakhstan, Alaska or the Middle East. This is a team that has been working together well for a long time, in more far-flung locations than most world travelers even dream of.

The OMG crew is a textbook example of a high-performance team: a group with diverse and complementary expertise, well-defined jobs, ambitious goals and a strong commitment to the mission and to each other. On their arrival in Iceland, the group consisted of two mechanics/ground crew, two pilots, three flight engineers, the project manager and the principal investigator. A few people have swapped in and out since then, but each team member has distinct responsibilities, and each is essential to keep the mission running. “It’s been a great team effort here,” summarized flight engineer Phil Vaughn. “We’ve got the coordination down to a real good point where everybody knows what each other is doing.”

Johnny Scott and Dave Fuller are the ground crew, responsible for preflight and postflight checks and routine maintenance. Scott has worked on the NASA G-III for eight or nine years. The preflight check, which takes an hour or more for the two crew members, includes a walkaround where they simply apply their trained eyes to the aircraft inside and out. “After you’ve looked at the airplane so long, you’ll catch things fast,” Scott said. “You’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s not right.’ You’ll investigate. Most of the time you don’t find anything [significant], but you might find a leak or a crack, or something out of place.”

Arctic cold hasn’t added a lot of additional maintenance chores, Fuller said, because the planes are in heated hangars at their bases. The main difference Is air pressure. Just as you change your car’s tire pressure in winter in a cold climate, the plane systems also need to change. It’s not just tires: it’s things like the brake accumulator pressure—the reserve air needed for emergency brakes. “If the conditions are set correctly on the ground, then the plane will be fine while flying,” he explained.

Flying is the business of the pilots, and so are all the concerns that go with it—weather, flight plans, fuel management and a multitude of details. Bill Ehrenstrom is the pilot in charge. He and Scott Reagan have flown so many hours over Greenland already that they were concerned they would hit the 30-day limit of 100 hours, so they were joined in Iceland by Chris Condon. “We’ve been lucky to see things that a lot of people don’t ever get to see,” Ehrenstrom said about flying all those hours. “But the weather has been a challenge. We haven’t been able to drop probes in some place because of the weather, and it hasn’t always been the greatest at the sites.”

All three pilots had former careers in the military, and Reagan is planning to undertake a third career soon that some people would find even more intimidating than his first two: teaching high school history or physics.

“Never in my life did I think I’d get to drop things out of the airplane when we were out flying,” said flight engineer Vaughn. A flight engineer is responsible knowing all the plane’s electrical and computer systems and monitoring them during the flights, as well as supporting the pilots.  On top of that, it’s safe to say that Vaughn and Terry Lee are the world’s experts on dropping probes out of a G-III—this is the first experiment ever to do such a thing, and the aircraft had to be specifically modified to allow it. “It’s kind of a rush,” Lee said.

“Project manager” sounds like a desk job, but not on a NASA field project. Steve Dinardo doesn’t just track expenses; he tracks probe data at the airborne computer as well as shipboard operations in support of OMG and myriad other details. “To get this to all hang together and work sometimes is a miracle,” he said. Dinardo started at NASA working on space missions. “Aircraft projects are a lot more fun than spacecraft and a lot more challenging. I get to see the whole project from Step 1 to Step 100. That’s something you don’t get with spacecraft.”

The last team member is principal investigator Willis. OMG is his brain child, and he’s responsible for overall execution, as well as helping with science-related decisions in the field such as choosing good alternate sites for probe drops if the original choice is too iced in. Willis has integrated well with the rest of the crew, and he’s thrilled with their work. “I couldn’t have asked for a better team to support this mission,” he said. “It’s been a spectacular ride.”

by CAROL RASMUSSEN 

NASA’s Ocean Melting Greenland, or OMG, campaign is back in the Arctic, and this month it’s dropping scientific probes out of a NASA aircraft into the water just off Greenland’s coastline. The probes are the fourth and final part of OMG’s observations this year documenting how seawater is melting the underside of the world’s second largest ice sheet.

Three things about Greenland: it’s huge, it’s remote, and it’s melting so fast that scientists use words like “falling apart” and “vanishing” to describe what they’re seeing. But the hugeness and remoteness mean that many parts of the island have gone completely unmeasured. There aren’t enough data for scientists to be confident that they understand how processes are interacting now, much less how the melting will progress in coming years.

“It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen to Greenland because we’ve never watched it melt before,” said Josh Willis, OMG’s principal investigator with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The measurements OMG is making this month, and over the next four Septembers, should reduce some of the uncertainty.

To collect data around Greenland’s entire coastline, the OMG team is using four bases. Slice two imaginary lines across the island, one north-south and the other east-west, and there’s a different OMG base for each quarter, more or less. The bases for measuring the west side of the island are on Greenland itself; for the east side, the bases are in Iceland and on the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

OMG isn’t moving methodically around the island. It’s spending a few days in one location and then another, sometimes doubling back to the first location, as logistics and weather dictate. An Earth Expeditions reporting team will catch up with the team in a few days from Iceland. For now, here are some images from the field, captured by the team members themselves.

Willis and the other OMG scientists timed this campaign to coincide with the Arctic sea ice minimum (conditionally announced on Sept. 10) so they would have the best chance of finding open water to drop probes into. But even at minimum, there’s still plenty of ice around Greenland. In loosely packed ice like this, dropping probes has been no problem. But in other locations, the water is almost completely covered with big plates of ice separated by narrow cracks, testing the team’s ability to hit their open-water targets. Some areas are completely ice-covered, with no possibility for dropping probes.

If you want to drop probes along the coast, you need to be able to see the coast. The weather doesn’t always cooperate. On this day, no data were successfully collected.

The probes are similar to those dropped by hurricane hunters to monitor the ocean during storms. There’s a parachute to waft the package safely to the ocean surface. When it hits the water, a float inflates to hold up a radio transmitter. A sensor, tethered to the transmitter by wire, sinks some 3,000 feet (if the water is that deep), measuring water temperature and salinity on the way down. The transmitter relays these data back to the aircraft. OMG will drop about 250 of these probes by the end of its deployment in early October. Combined with maps of the seafloor shape around the coast that OMG is also producing, the probe measurements will give a picture of where warm, deeper water can creep onto the continental shelf and eat away at the glaciers fringing the ice sheet.

To read more about OMG in the field:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/2016/09/21/swoosh/