OMG! Oceans Are Melting Greenland with Josh Willis

Josh Willis spent the last 20 years studying the rising oceans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2012, he did two seemingly unrelated things. The first was writing a 30-million-dollar grant proposal to NASA to study the oceans around Greenland. The second was finishing his first ever improv comedy class at the Second City in Hollywood. The unusual confluence of these two events shaped the next decade of his science career and sent him on the adventure of a lifetime.

Willis got his grant funded and set out on a mission to not only discover, but to also document and share his journey with the public. He named the mission OMG, for Oceans Melting Greenland. For 6 years, he spent his summers flying circles around the island in a modified DC-3 airplane collecting data about the oceans and the ice and how they changed together. As he flew past giant icebergs and broken glaciers, he helped scientists figure out how much the oceans were eating away Greenland’s ice from below (answer: a lot). Along the way, he met other adventurers, shared his experiences on social media, conducted hundreds of interviews with the press and even developed an alter ego to help explain how climate change works. Enter Climate Elvis.

The mission was a success. Boasting over 100 (and counting) science publications based on the data, OMG changed the way we think about Greenland melting, and it also changed Josh. He found a new passion for sharing science with the public, and a new passion for acting. While he dreams of playing Climate Elvis full time, he has not yet quit his day job.
Josh Willis is the lead NASA scientist for the satellite missions that measure global sea level rise from space. In 2016, he led a 6-year long NASA airborne mission to understand how the warming oceans were melting Greenland’s ice from below. It was called Oceans Melting Greenland, or OMG for short. OMG took him to Greenland every summer for 6 years where he circled the ice sheet to measure how the oceans and ice were changing. When he’s not launching sea-level satellites or flying around Greenland, Josh enjoys using comedy as a tool for communicating about climate change with the public and is known in some circles as Climate Elvis.  

This program was organized by Andrea Donnellan #1246.