Pandemonium

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Thanks to Don Lovett, chair of the biology department at the University of New Jersey, for helping me design another roller coaster; Michael Limber for bringing the visuals to life; my agent, Peter McGuigan at Foundry, for greasing the rails; and Bob Gleason, for being just crazy enough to open the ride to the public.

We think of the underworld as a place for the dead. Yet beneath our feet teems a world of life more vibrant, diverse, mysterious, and resilient than anything clinging to Earth’s fragile exterior.

Our deepest drills, boring a mile below the ocean floor, found life. Three miles down the shaft of a South African gold mine, life was waiting for us. Even inside a body of water the size of Lake Ontario locked two miles under the surface of Antarctica, researchers found an entire ecosystem of life they never imagined.

In the depths of the Earth dwell organisms impervious to boiling heat, freezing cold, intense radiation, toxic salinity, noxious gases, extreme pressure, and total darkness. Far from fragile, these communities of extremophiles have proved themselves hardier than any surface life in the temperate zones that we call home.

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