NASA Research on Sea Level Rise in Greenland

A NASA Interdisciplinary sciences project by UGA faculty lead by Thomas Mote and including Patricia Yager and Renato Castelao collected data this summer at the top of the world:

On Greenland’s ice sheet, a vast icy landscape crisscrossed by turquoise rivers and dotted with melt water lakes, a small cluster of orange camping tents popped up in late July. The camp, home for a week to a team of researchers, sat by a large, fast-flowing river. Just a kilometer downstream, the river dropped into a seemingly bottomless moulin, or sinkhole in the ice. The low rumble of the waters, the shouted instructions from scientists taking measurements, and the chop of the blades of a helicopter delivering personnel and gear was all that was heard in the frozen landscape.

This camp was Laurence C. Smith’s field research site in west Greenland. Smith, a professor and chair of geography at University of California, Los Angeles, and his NASA-funded team were studying the hydrology of the ice sheet – how the shifting network of streams and rivers that form during the melt season transport water from surface of the ice to the ocean, contributing to sea level rise.

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On July 19, Smith’s camp on the Greenland ice sheet had visitors: researchers Marco Tedesco, an associate professor at the City College of New York, and Tom Mote, a climatologist at University of Georgia. The two scientists were taking measurements of the albedo (the ability to reflect sunshine) of the basin. Albedo changes during the melt season because melt makes the snow and ice crystals grow and become less reflective. At the same time, dark material such as soot, dust and biological material is darkening the surface of the ice. The darker the ice, the more energy it absorbs, which leads to more melting.

From the helicopter, Tedesco and Mote were flying the prototype of a new spectrometer – an instrument that measures the intensity of solar light: first pointing it at the sky to calculate how much sun radiation was coming down, and then downward to see how much energy the ice sheet was absorbing. The researchers were also collecting geo-located, very high-resolution images from a digital camera mounted under the belly of the helicopter.

The UGA team coordinated with a separate field project by UCLA's Smith, whose collaborator, Asa Rennermalm of Rutgers, is also on the UGA project. The complementary projects are a great expression of the levels of coordination and collaboration necessary to work at this scale to document the front lines of climate change on its most important shore. NASA funds dozens of projects that look into factors such as the role of warming ocean waters in melting glaciers from below and how the land might rebound. Our scientists are actively enagged in broadening our understanding of sea level rise and what it physically means for the planet.

Image: Streams and rivers that form on top of the Greenland ice sheet during spring and summer are the main agent transporting melt runoff from the ice sheet to the ocean. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Maria-José Viñas