No Catastrophe Too Small
<p>Houston wasn’t supposed to be this hot in June. Nevertheless, as the American Society for Microbiology convened its annual meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center, a sprawling glass-and-white-aluminum complex on the edge of downtown, the city recorded its first 100 degree day — <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/article/houston-100-degrees-temperature-records-18160740.php" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">a whole month earlier than normal</a>. This was the first of 45 days of triple-digit temperatures for Houston in 2023, only one day short of the all-time record of 46 consecutive days in 2011. This extreme heat event was a fitting backdrop for the society’s first session of a newly named but growing field: disaster microbiology, the science of anything-but-normal.</p>
<p>Self-proclaimed disaster microbiologists have spent their careers researching a diversity of catastrophes: record-breaking heat waves like the ones seen in Houston, the environmental legacy of decades of U.S. weapons testing on Vieques, one of the islands that make up Puerto Rico, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/24/climate/warmer-wetter-world.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">creeping spread of drought</a> to much of America’s heartland. But these scientists go beyond the visible impacts of disaster — the rows of shriveled crops or the shrapnel fragments left in sand. They take to the microscope to see how these events impact microbes, the tiny but mighty organisms that cycle nutrients through the ground and cause pandemics.</p>
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