Intraterrestrials
Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A biologist’s firsthand account of the hunt for life beneath earth’s surface—and how new discoveries are challenging our most basic assumptions about the nature of life on Earth
Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface. Intraterrestrials shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.
Drawing on her experiences and those of her fellow scientists working in challenging and often dangerous conditions, Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes. Only discovered in recent decades, “intraterrestrials”—subsurface beings that are truly alien—are demonstrating how life can exist in boiling water, pure acid, and bleach. They enable us to peer back to the very dawn of life on Earth, disclosing deep branches on the tree of life that push the limits of what we thought possible. Some can “breathe” rocks or even electrons. Others may live for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. All of them are living in ways that are totally foreign to us surface dwellers.
Blending captivating storytelling with the latest science, Intraterrestrials reveals what microbes in Earth’s deep subsurface biosphere can tell us about the prospects for finding life on other planets—and the future of life on our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lloyd, an environmental studies professor at the University of Southern California, debuts with an astonishing study of the remarkable microorganisms that thrive in the "subsurface biosphere," which entails subterranean habitats "from the dirt right under our feet... to oceanic sediments piled tens of kilometers deep." Recounting her daring research expeditions to study intraterrestrial microorganisms, Lloyd describes descending to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in a submersible too small to sit up in and hiking into the crater of the active Poás Volcano in Costa Rica to collect samples. She highlights the amazing strategies microbes developed to survive in such inhospitable environments, discussing how some organisms subsist on chemicals produced by the melting of rock, and how those in a highly acidic volcanic lake evolved "very small pore sizes on the proteins that span their membrane" to keep out protons that would otherwise pass into their cells and upend their internal pH levels. Other findings defy assumptions about the laws of nature. For instance, Lloyd notes that some microbes under the ocean floor survive on "0.00001 percent of the power that supports all other known types of cell growth on Earth," suggesting they might spend millions of years in a state of suspended animation waiting to accrue enough energy to multiply. Filled with mind-blowing trivia that will change how readers think about life on Earth, this captivates.
