NASA's "OMG" program tries to determine how fast Greenland ice melts

Greenland's ice cap melts six times faster than in the 1980s. This month, it lost 11 billion tonnes of surface ice in one day, enough to fill more than four million Olympic pools.

The summer has arrived earlier and should last longer. Greenlanders reported experiencing more extreme weather and fishermen catch warmer fish. They live with climate change and scientists have come from all over the world to study why.

Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in the fourth year of a five-year research project that he has designed. His team is launching probes into the ocean to understand how the waters around Greenland are warming up and contributing to melting glaciers.

On Saturday, the Willis team dropped probes telling them salinity and water temperature during a nearly seven-hour flight covering more than 800 km.

"We generally think that Greenland ice is a kind of ice cube with a hair dryer, but in fact, this ice cube is also in a pot of water," Willis told Seth Doane for "CBS This Morning" . "And the water is also warming up and the two elements combined can combine to create a sea level rise that is happening much faster than expected."

Willis named his program "Oceans Melting Greenland". His acronym, "O-M-G", was not a mistake. He said that humanity should be surprised and pay attention.

"There is enough ice in Greenland to raise the sea level by 25 feet worldwide," Willis said. "Now, we do not think it will happen right away, but we are trying to figure out how fast this is going with OMG."

Greenland may feel like a remote place, but what happens there will make a difference for anyone living in a coastal region around the world.

"We all live with an ocean," Willis said. "Thus, one billion tonnes of ice lost here in Greenland means sea level rise in Florida, California, New York and even Australia."

Until now, OMG missions have shown how glaciers are sensitive to the ocean. And they also produced a better map of the seabed, allowing them to determine which glaciers are threatened. The answer: more than they thought.