Flying over eastern Greenland, the NASA scientists stared down from a Gulfstream jet as it followed the precise course they had flown in previous years — using radar to map the loss of ice.
“In the tube,” flight engineer David Elliott said as the team locked into their route over the ice sheet covering 80 percent of the world’s largest island. Out the window, massive chunks of broken ice looked like salt flakes on the water.
The March mission was part of NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project, a five-year, $30 million effort aimed at improving sea level rise projections by understanding how warming oceans are melting ice sheets from below - the most ambitious research on the subject to date.
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