Marie Sanderson

High Heels in the Tundra: My Life As a Geographer and Climatologist Marie Sanderson

This is the story of a woman who loved her career of geographer and climatologist. Marie Sanderson writes of the intellectual stimulation she experienced as a student at the universities of Toronto, Maryland and Michigan and of the professors who inspired her. She describes the innovative climate experiments she undertook while at the Ontario Research Foundation and the University of Windsor, and the water research centres she established at the universities of Windsor and Waterloo. She is an expert on the Great Lakes and their changing levels. Marie also writes of her life as a professor, not only at Windsor, but also at the University of Hawaii, and in the Nunavut region of Arctic Canada where she organized courses on the Arctic environment. As the title of the book indicates, she has had a life-long interest in the world's northern regions. Much of the book is about traveling. Marie writes of attending geography conferences in many parts of the world, and unique experiences in the USSR and China as an invited guest of their science academies. She also describes some unusual occurrences, such as a near-disastrous canoe trip in Canada's Northwest Territories and an unpleasant encounter with a customs official in Leningrad.