Intraterrestrials: Discovering the strangest life on Earth Karen Lloyd
Event details
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’s unlike anything seen on the surface.
Join biologist Karen Lloyd, author of Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, as she 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 will take you on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean in submersibles 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.
What can these microbes in Earth’s deep surface biosphere tell us about the prospects for finding life on other planets - and the future of life on our own?
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speaker
Karen G. Lloyd is the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in leading publications such as Nature and Science. She is the author of Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth (Princeton University Press, 2025).
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