Becoming Water: Glaciers in a Warming World

Michael Demuth

Oct 2012 · Rocky Mountain Books Ltd

About this ebook

Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.

Becoming Water takes the reader on a tour of Canada’s glaciers, describing the stories they tell and educating the reader about how glaciers came to be, how they work and what their future holds in our warming world. By visiting Canada’s high and low Arctic and the mountain West, the reader will learn how varied and complex our glaciers really are, how they are measured and how they figure into the national and global story of inevitable change. The reader will learn to think like a scientist, in particular how to look at climate-related data that contains cycles, trends and shifts, and then ponder what questions to ask in the face of our dramatically changing environment. This book encourages Canadians to explore upstream from ourselves, learning about our origins and how climate change and encroaching human settlement are drastically affecting our glaciers and therefore the natural and human landscapes that lie below—and are dependent upon—them.

Ratings and reviews

Finally a book containing both beautiful description and hard science about the dynamic entities we call glaciers. These, our global “canaries in the coal mine” need to be understood in more depth by all citizens of planet earth. The author’s intimate knowledge and obvious passion about his subject flows through the pages of this book with an elegance and ease; it is presented in a way that is accessible to all. A great read on an important subject.

About the author

Mike Demuth hails from Calgary and has studied snow and ice in its various forms on land and water for the last 30 years with the National Research Council, Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada as a glaciology/cold regions research scientist. Mike’s attention to studying changes in Canada’s mountain West and the Canadian Arctic was secured by his participation in a research expedition to Mount Logan in 1981. This book is his first public outreach endeavour regarding climate science, water and the stories that glaciers tell. He and his wife live in Braeside, Ontario, and have two daughters and a granddaughter.