Thursday, Oct 22
1:30-2:45 PM
In the past few decades, the technology to sequence DNA directly from environmental samples has shown us that we had been missing the vast majority of the biodiversity on Earth. Much of this new life is in our deep subsurface, at crushing extremes of pressures, temperatures, pH, and toxic chemicals; places where life doesn’t seem possible, yet we’re finding that it exists. Join me as I take you on my real-world adventures to the bottom of the ocean, inside active volcanoes, and to the wild polar-bear inhabited Arctic to find out what makes these intraterrestrials tick. This life has figured out how to “breathe” rocks, live from electricity alone, and maybe even increase their lifespans to hundreds of millions of years. It sounds like sci-fi, but it’s not. These real scientific discoveries show us, time after time, that there is so much left to discover on our beautiful Earth. These INTRA-terrestrials may even bring us closer to finally discovering EXTRA-terrestrials outside our planet. When it comes to the intraterrestrials, the sky is NOT the limit!
