A great piece of science journalism

I really enjoyed this New York Times article about scientists measuring the melting of Greenland's ice sheet.  It has so many great elements:

beautiful images and video. We often think of science as complicated and abstract, but the beauty of nature is what drives a lot of us to keep at it.  Capturing our work with a beautiful image is a worthy goal for scientists who want the public to be able to relate to their work.  In this article, the images and video are especially well integrated into the text, rather than standing apart from it.

the whole story of the research.  Too often we see just the final result, but this article explains so much more: why the team thinks the research is worthwhile, how they got funding for it, how hard they work, and how persistent and creative they are at problem-solving in pursuit of their measurements.

scale: this is one of the most difficult things for scientists to convey.  This team is measuring the melting in one small part of the ice sheet, but with the hope of extrapolating to the entire ice sheet.  The article literally zooms in from a view of all Greenland to a view of the campsite, and then---very importantly---zooms us back out to see the big picture again.

we practice thinking scientifically. Even those who are quite familiar with the basics of global warming and sea level rise will learn an important nuance: models of ice melt are far cruder than the reality.  The greater the extent to which these rivers flow under the ice sheet, the faster we may lose the ice sheet and get truly substantial sea level rise.  These measurements will help us improve the model and therefore the forecast.  This article also shows how good scientists withhold judgment until the facts are in: although massive ice loss is an alarming prospect, the team "might even learn...that the water is refreezing within the ice sheet and that sea levels are actually rising more slowly than models project."

Good job, NYT!  This is a model for science journalism.