From Saturday’s NY Times on measuring the melt:

Taking the temperature of waters near the ice sheet is essential if scientists are to make sense of what is happening in Greenland. But it is a complex and risky business.

The two scientists — Dr. (Fiamma) Straneo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and Dr. (Gordon) Hamilton, of the University of Maine — are part of a larger team that has been traveling here every summer with financing from the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that sponsors much of the nation’s most important research. Not only do they remove the doors of helicopters and lean over icy fjords to get their readings, but they dodge huge icebergs in tiny boats and traipse over glaciers scarred by crevasses that could swallow large buildings.