The Unexpected Threat To Greenland's Melting Glaciers (HBO)

[Music] this summer a chunk of ice the size of lower Manhattan broke off a glacier in eastern Greenland it contained 10 billion tons of ice and the video of the event was a perfectly shareable piece of climate change Dredd except a team of NASA scientists studying sea-level rise has much more dreadful much less visible news glaciers aren't just melting from above they're melting from below over the past few years Eric Daniel has been measuring glaciers in Greenland as part of a NASA expedition called oceans melting Greenland or OMG yeah I've seen that a long time [Music] the missions main objective is to study the biggest and most overlooked source of glacial melt warm ocean currents hundreds of metres below the surface so you're scanning the seafloor right now yeah we're measuring the glacier you know all the way to the foot of the glacier I mean it basically it is standing in the water right now we are going other where the glacier used to be you know you can see landmarks you know along the side of the glacier evidence of the loss of ice unlike most bodies of water the ocean surrounding Greenland actually gets warmer with increasing depth that's because warm salty currents from the Atlantic are heavier than fresh glacial water so those currents end up on the bottom and that is why NASA is mapping the ocean floor as Greenland's deepest waters warm the biggest glaciers melt at increasing speeds and figuring out just how fast that's happening may help humans figure out just how much hurt were in for did we always know that glaciers were melting from the bottom no this is something we started thinking about maybe 10 years ago 10 years ago yeah why do you think it took so long probably because we saw so many changes in the glaciers you really have to figure out what is missing here and understanding prior to that probably people never asked the question because there's no dramatic change in the glaciers that they could relate to between 2002 and 2016 Greenland lost about 280 Giga tons of ice a year that amount of melted ice which would be enough to fill more than a billion the Olympic sized swimming pools cause global sea levels to rise measurably and as the oceans warm that's only going to increase the glaciers that are really big and really deep are the ones that we should be worried about yes the water not only melts the glaciers from below so it produces some counting it forces the gracious to retreat it's like opening a dam they are the major control on what's happening on the ice sheets they control everything the OMG mission is trying to create the most comprehensive picture of Greenland's glacial coastline ever made Eric does this from the ocean surface by sailing into iceberg crowded fjords to gather data on the hardest to reach glaciers [Music] but there's another component of the mission that's gathering a much broader set of data from the sky that's where Josh Willis comes in he runs the OMG mission out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena so this is our ocean survey basically this is all the places we just got back from all the dots are places where we're measuring the temperature and salinity of the ocean we fly this plane around and we drop censors out of the prom they fall in a little parachute and when they reach the ocean they split into two parts and a part stays at the surface and the other part Falls it falls all the way down to the sea floor a thousand meters and as it goes it's measuring the temperature and the saltiness of the water and then that gets radioed back to the plane in real-time so they'll give us a really good picture of what's going on all the way around Greenland why focus so much energy and money on Greenland Greenland has enough ice to raise sea levels by 25 feet if it all melted today now we don't think that the ice is gonna melt in one year but the difference between 25 feet in a thousand years and 25 feet in a couple hundred years is actually devastating as well and that's really what we're trying to get at with oMG because if the ice sheet is going to melt quickly it will be because of this ocean ice interaction not because of the air warming and if we're reshaping the coastline in a radical way you know do you want to take out a 30-year mortgage on a house that might be flooded in 30 years and so it's real and it's time to start dealing with it 200 how does it make you feel to see all of this change I think it's it's sometimes a little bit difficult to convey the magnitude of the change to the public some of these changes are so dramatic this is sort of impressive denial it just can't be true it can't be happening so fast right you're just exaggerating or maybe it's just a few warmer summers but it's not like that these changes are pretty big and this is just the beginning [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 237,341

Rating: 4.7451959 out of 5

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, vice news 2018, The Unexpected Threat To Greenland's Melting Glaciers, climate change, climate science, greenland melting glaciers, global warming, NASA scientists, Jet propulsion lab, glacial melt, water surface, environment, greenland ocean, atlantic waters, warming ocean, greenhouse gas, josh willis, ocean mapping, oceans melting greenland, OMG, eric rignot, iceberg lemting, NASA greenland project, nat geo

Id: QubYjSTMGs0

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018