[1] In the early part of his career, he codeveloped techniques to record the motions of energetic charged particles in solids, in particular plastics.
On the one hand, inspection of the tracks is a valuable tool in determining properties of charged particles as e.g. cosmic rays.
Use of the technique in an experiment carried by a high-altitude balloon in 1975 resulted in the detection of one highly anomalous cosmic ray particle that traversed a stack of 32 sheets of Lexan plastic.
However, Luis W. Alvarez proposed that this track can be explained with a platinum atom decaying into osmium and later into tantalum.
[7] During his work with AMANDA, he showed that micrometre-size bacteria and archaea can live in liquid veins throughout depths of several kilometers in glacial ice.