Stephanie Martin went for a walk with Jimmy Carter on the Arctic tundra. Carter, she says, is the smartest man she’s ever met.

But then came the moment when Martin had to tell the former president that he really shouldn’t do what he wanted to do.

“He wanted to see reindeer, but I knew he’d be up to his knees in mud. I told him, ‘You’ll get stuck in mud and I’ll lose my job.’ ”

Carter laughed, the walk continued, the muddy hazards were avoided.

It can all be pretty heady stuff for a woman from Providence who offers this brief description of what she does: “I watch a lot of water.”

Watching water as Martin watches water sometimes means sailing with people like Carter and Ted Turner and Madeleine Albright who want to see firsthand how the world is changing. They sail into stunning natural classrooms and discuss what they find. They take walks in places that can take your breath away.

And Martin is there as a scientist. She sees things the untrained eye might not.

“I’m very fortunate to travel around the world and then come back home to this wonderful family of mine,” she says.

She was 13 when she went on a whale watch and set her course.

“The naturalist on the boat had the best job. I decided I’d study whales.”

After graduation from La Salle Academy, she went to College of the Atlantic in Maine. Some friends told her she was crazy to go to “a little hippie college” to study whales. They didn’t understand. The college had a marine mammal research program.

She spent three summers in and around a lighthouse on a 3½-acre hunk of rock 25 miles out in the Atlantic. It was called Mount Desert Rock.

“It’s a great place,” says Martin. “There’s no running water. It takes self-reliance.”

Her father, Al, came for a visit. He seemed to like the place.

She is 37 now and she has stuck to the idea hatched on that whale watch about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She has gone looking for the whales, and a lot of other creatures. They all continue to teach her.

In the midst of it all, she managed to squeeze in a master’s degree at the University of Rhode Island.

She is home for a few days with her husband, Simon Morley, an Englishman who found some similarities to cricket when he attended a Red Sox game at Fenway Park last week.

They met in Antarctica, a place, says Martin, that “gets in your soul.”

They met on common ground. Both are passionate about the science, about studying what the changing climate is doing to us.

“We met at a barbecue,” says Martin. “We chatted for four hours. Then we didn’t see each other for 10 months.”

They were married four years ago at the Quidnessett Country Club in North Kingstown. And they embarked on a life that is never threatened by dull predictability.

“Our life doesn’t fit in ‘the box,’ ” says Martin.

“The normal stuff of life can be a real problem for us,” says Morley.

There are times when financing for their research is uncertain. A steady paycheck is not one of the reasons for doing what they do. The science is. The urgency to understand and respond to climate change is too.

They work on projects together, but sometimes they go in very different directions, Martin with Lindblad Expeditions, the company that offers those cruises filled with stunning scenery and a heap of environmental insights. And Morley with the British Antarctic Survey, where he continues his research into the changes created by climate change.

“We will always be involved in the movement to change the view of climate change,” says Morley.

Martin says that slowly but surely, awareness of the changes and the responsibility they impose is spreading. Even members of her family seem to be coming around.

It was so good to meet two people passionately committed to their work and to each other. It was a welcome break in the local storm.

And the best thing they told me is that there’s hope for the future. There really is.

bkerr@projo.com