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.

Mike Demuth hails from Calgary and has studied snow and ice in its various forms on land and water for the last 35 years with the National Research Council, Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada as a glaciology/cold regions research scientist. He is also Senior Research Fellow with the University of Saskatchewan's Centre for Hydrology and Adjunct Professor with the University of Victoria's Northern and High Country Weather Impacts Laboratory. 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 Margaret divide their time between Lund, BC and Braeside, Ontario, and have two daughters and three granddaughters.

Mike Demuth's profile page

Fascinating and foreboding. Michael Demuth artfully weaves science, myth, and poetry into a riveting story that will send an icy shiver down the spine of anyone who professes to love Canada, mountains, or Nature.—David R. Boyd>, Adjunct Professor, Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University and author of The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Environment

This quiet unassuming little book contains a wealth of knowledge about Canada's glaciers, chronicling their origin, and how they changes and contribute to global change. Included are the myths and legends told about glaciers, as well as how scientific data is collected and interpreted for use in dealing with our changing environment. There are lots of footnotes explaining terms as well as charts, diagrams, maps and photographs as well as suggestions for things to do and questions to ask about glacier melt and global warming.—BC Books for BC Schools, 2014-2015