In a field like science that favors men and traditional learning techniques, author and scientist M Jackson challenges these standards. 

“I’m really, really passionate about science, about getting people to think about science, expanding who gets to do science,” Jackson says, especially women.

Jackson, who lives in Eugene and has a doctorate from the University of Oregon, is a science communicator, geographer and glaciologist, often working in the Arctic and Antarctica. While she began communicating science through non-fiction science books like The Secret Lives of Glaciers and While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change, she says she has learned to embrace fiction as a tool to educate people about the work she does.

Ice to Water, Jackson’s second novel, came out Sept. 10. She will be doing a reading and book signing at Tsunami Books on Sept. 17.

“The main character in this book, she has to navigate and deal with the possibility of what she might or might not have done to her husband, and deal with issues of responsibility, deal with issues of denial,” Jackson says.

The mystery follows a woman who finds an ice cave in a glacier on her property in Alaska, inciting a wave of “last chance tourism,” a phenomenon where people want to see something that’s being impacted by climate change before it’s gone, Jackson says.

The book is “trying to understand what impact that might have in a community, in this case, in a fictional town in southeast Alaska,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about glacier change and climate change and climate change denial and issues of responsibility.”

Ice to Water explores how people move through changing landscapes knowing they are probably contributing to the change, Jackson says.

“What does that do to us as people? So I took that construct and I applied it to a marriage,” she says. “How do we interact with community? How do we cope? Who do we call in and out? How do we think of ourselves as still lovable if we’ve done something terrible?”

Jackson says she enjoys reading academic papers, but she knows not everyone does. Some people like to see things explained on YouTube, and some prefer stories, she says.

“I think that somebody doesn’t need to care a damn thing about science or climate change or glacier change, and they can pick this book up and read about a woman who might or might not be the most likable, a woman who’s also struggling, and they might be there for that,” Jackson says.

Jackson says while growing up in Washington and Alaska she didn’t see being a scientist as a future career option.

“I’d never met another scientist, let alone a female scientist when I was younger,” she says.

In her late teens Jackson worked as a backcountry guide in Alaska.

“I had all these questions about ice, and I couldn’t find the answers to them,” she says.

She was working with people who worked for the National Geographic Society, and they encouraged her to answer her questions. Now, Jackson is a National Geographic explorer — “exceptional individuals in their fields” who receive funding and support from the National Geographic Society

“That was the very first time in my life that I asked people questions like this, and they told me I had the capability to answer them,” Jackson says.

Though Jackson began her career in science in a traditional program, she says she found a love for science communication after doing some film and television work and making “crash course” videos on the climate, she says.

Jackson’s first novel, The Ice Sings Back, is another mystery that engages with environmental and generational traumas as four women’s lives intersect over the Collier Glacier in the Three Sisters Wilderness, Jackson says.

“The process of writing these books has told me that writing is how I most want to express myself on this planet. It’s what makes sense and feels right to me. I want to talk to people in this community about that,” she says.

M Jackson reads from Ice to Water at 7 pm Sept. 17 at Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette Street. TsunamiBooks.org. Find out more about M Jackson’s work at DrMJackson.com.