C.F.M. Mike Lewis

At the age of 86, Mike passed away from cancer, with his family at his side, on Friday, January 17, 2025 at the Palliative Care Unit of Dartmouth General Hospital. Mike will be missed by his wife Suzanne, daughters Kelly (Rick), Wendy (Rob), his step-children Alan (Holly), Sarah (Rob), John (Jocelyn) and his 11 grandchildren. He will also be missed by his sister, Sally (Peter) and brother, Jim (Joanne) and his many cousins, colleagues and friends.

Life and Family

Mike was born in Iroquois Falls, Ontario in 1938. He spent his childhood and early life in Ontario establishing a family and career.

Mike joined Sue and her children 47 years ago and they all moved to Dartmouth. Mike and Sue took on the large project of renovating their early 19th century house. They enjoyed exploring Nova Scotia’s historic towns, hiking trails and beautiful landscapes using a "Geological Highway Map" to enhance their travels. Mike and Sue travelled to Newfoundland/Labrador exploring the geological wonders there.

In 1989, they bought a property in East Hants County on the Shubenacadie River where Mike took great pride in planting trees of the Acadian forest species which he called the "New Forest". Mike's father had been a forester which influenced his interest in and love of trees.

Annually, Mike and Sue visited family on the west coast of British Columbia. Mike and his brother Jim, also a geologist, took a “Lewis Brothers Geological Field Trip”, exploring areas of B.C. or the U.S. each year.

Mike visited his daughters, Kelly and Wendy, in Ontario often and gathered with extended family. Kelly and Wendy were also fortunate to visit their “Dartmouth family” often over the years, making the Dartmouth area feel like a second home.

Career

After completing his PhD in 1967 at U of T, working on Lake Erie, Mike enjoyed a long career (more than 55 years) as a research scientist (later emeritus) with the Geological Survey of Canada, first in Burlington, then in Ottawa, and finally for over 40 years at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, NS.

He made important contributions on continental shelf seabed sedimentary processes, iceberg scour, and other seabed and lakebed hazards. He also took part in an ice camp

expedition that drifted across the Arctic Ocean within 40 km of the North Pole. But Mike’s central focus was always on the remarkable postglacial evolution of the North American Great Lakes. He could see the big picture and the small details. He was widely recognized as the pre-eminent expert on the tilting, shifting drainage, large lake level fluctuations, climate and water balance of these lakes and their ice-dammed predecessors.

Having discovered in the late 1990s that drought had left the South Basin of Lake Winnipeg dry for several thousand years, he went on to demonstrate that most basins in the Great Lakes had also experienced periods of low levels with no drainage, a major paradigm shift that revealed the great sensitivity of these large freshwater reserves to subtle changes in climate.

Among other honours, for this work Mike received the prestigious W.A. Johnston Award of the Canadian Quaternary Association in 2015.

With appreciation to Donald Forbes, a colleague at BIO, for writing and providing this overview of Mike’s career.

An on-line Memorial Service will take place in May.