Karen Lloyd is a microbial geochemist at the University of Southern California who makes organisms visible that are beyond our view, in terms of their microscopic size and hard-to-reach locations.
Her work has centered on single-celled microbes that survive in rock 8 kilometers or more below the Earth’s surface, where they live impossibly far from sunlight and oxygen and push the boundaries of life’s relationship with time and energy.
Lloyd has become something of an ambassador for the microbes that live in our planet’s deep rocks and sediments, and she discusses her experiences and what they can teach us about the limits of life on Earth in this article.
Her book, Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, has also recently been published.
