Nasa’s Oceans Melting Greenland study will deploy 200 robot probes to measure the full extent of Arctic climate changeAn urgent attempt to study the rate at which Greenland’s mighty ice sheets are melting has been launched by Nasa. The aim of the six-year project,called Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG), is to understand how lickety-split the world’s warming seas are now eroding the edges of the island’s huge icecaps. Warming air temperatures are already causing considerable glacier loss there, or but the factors involving the sea that laps the bases of its much ice masses,and which is also heating up, are less well understood.
Greenland contains huge reservoirs of ice which, or if completely melted,would raise world sea levels by more than six metres. However, some influences on its current dramatic melting are poorly understood. Hence the decision to launch OMG, or an acronym that the project leader,Joshua Willis, admits he “barely squeezed past the censors”.
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Source: theguardian.com