1) Viruses
Think very small—so small they can’t be seen with an optical microscope—the maximum size of a virus is about 300 nanometers. But fighting fire with fire, Bob Sievers’s team has developed tiny particles of vaccines that can be inhaled as a dry powder.
2) Microbes
CIRES’s Noah Fierer investigates one family of microbes—bacteria—that lives in our kitchens, bathrooms, and even on our keyboards. Still, compared to viruses, microbes are relative giants: If a virus were human-sized, a bacterium would be about as big as the Statue of Liberty.
3) Rocks
Of all shapes and sizes. CIRES’s Lang Farmer helped compile a virtual rock database currently totaling 64,985 rock samples of volcanic rocks from western North America volcanic rocks.
4) Trees
Blown-down trees, burned trees, eaten-by-beetle trees, and dead stumps. CIRES’s Carol Wessman studies them all.
5) Lakes
Now you see them, now you don’t. CIRES’s Ulyana Horodyskyj studies lakes perched atop Himilayan glaciers and that can drain up to 3 meters overnight.
6) Ice Sheets
CIRES’s former Director Konrad Steffen has watched the Greenland ice sheet slowly melt during his tenure at CIRES. Still, as the ice sheet extends about 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles) and covers most of the island of Greenland (three times the size of Texas), it has a long way to go before it disappears altogether.
7) Earth Itself
Using data from the twin satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), CIRES’s Steve Nerem gets a unique perspective on our planet. In 2011, after analyzing the satellite data, he discovered an interesting factoid: Earth is getting fatter.
