Greenland's ice sheet taken from 40,000 feet [Photo/NASA]

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Tuesday released a stunning image of Greenland's ice sheet taken from 40,000 feet by the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) field campaign team.

The picture was taken over the northeast coastline of Greenland when the OMG field campaign team flied NASA's G-III aircraft on Mar. 26 at about 40,000 feet, an altitude that provides a stunning perspective of one of the world's two great ice sheets (the other is Antarctica).

The OMG team is now just a few flights away from mapping glacier heights around the entire coast of Greenland. These measurements will form the baseline of this first-of-its-kind experiment, clarifying the picture of how Greenland's glaciers are responding at a time when many signs point to accelerating change.

OMG will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by investigating the extent to which the oceans are melting Greenland's ice. OMG will observe changing water temperatures and glaciers that reach the ocean around all of Greenland from 2015 to 2020.