Northshire Bookstore Event: Karen Lloyd – “Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth”

(Manchester Center, VT) On Saturday, July 5th at 6 pm, Northshire Bookstore is proud to host author and biologist Karen Lloyd to discuss her book Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest 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.

“Filled with mind-blowing trivia that will change how readers think about life on Earth, this captivates”  — Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“Part Indiana Jones, part Louis Pasteur, Lloyd engagingly explains the challenging fieldwork and sophisticated lab research that together are revealing the subterranean biota and showing why it matters” —Andrew H. Knoll, author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Karen 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.

For more information on this or other events, email events@northshire.com, or visit the Northshire Bookstore, originally founded in 1976, has locations in Manchester, Vermont and Saratoga Springs, NY as well as at Northshire.com. Our large but intimate general bookstores carry the largest selection of categories and genres including new & used fiction, history, cooking, arts and rare author-signed editions. We also have entire floors devoted to Children’s Books and toys, a full line of stationery, magazines, music, cards, calendars, locally-sourced foods and many fine gifts from clothing to jewelry. Open to the public daily from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM and 24/7 online with free shipping at www.northshire.com